Word: witness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Goddess of the Sewers -appear in British Author Reginald Reynolds' Cleanliness and Godliness-"A Discussion of the Problems of Sanitation from Earliest Times to the Present Day." Unlike most plumbings of such channels, Cleanliness and Godliness is a first-rate literary essay, overflowing with sanity and bubbling with wit. Its heroes include Moses (whose laws, says Author Reynolds, were based less on divine sanction than on pamphlets issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Health); Elizabethan Sir John Harington, the inventor of the water-closet ("his name [is] writ in water"), and Victorian Sir Edwin Chadwick (he popularized glazed earthenware...
...like this one: "I have never again heard from the crudite tea-taster, and what became of him I do not know. The busy years find us neglectful of those wise counselors who influenced our early lives." A gentle tear for the boys I left behind me. There is wit in "Solo in Tom-Toms," but the memoirs of a lesser journalist, though perhaps more lively than those of a prominent statesman, are scarcely important enough to trot out the long gray beard and the backward look...
...Wit's Progress. The sly dog who wrote this smooth doggerel says of himself: "I live a hideous life, and very often shave after lunch. I have four children and one wife. The fourth (a manchild) is extraordinarily handsome and good. All the other children are female and very high-minded...
...might also have said that he is 55, the son of a civil servant, an Oxford graduate (in jurisprudence), an ingrained reformer, a wonder at skittles, author of novels, plays, verse and broadsides, Britain's reigning wit, a Punch contributor since 1910, and since 1935 an Independent M.P. from Oxford...
...being read largely by military and naval personnel. Editors were out of touch with their readers. There came a point where most of the stories were of no interest, or very little interest, to the majority of readers, who were appeased with drivel written by their own representatives. To wit, this is from Scuttlebut...