Word: wodehousian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...consult Webster's Dictionary rather than the Oxford. Victorian and Edwardian euphemisms such as "bally" and "ruddy" work their way into the tale of a British knight who once "allowed some hornswoggling highbinder to stick him with . . . dud Smelly River Ordinaries"*-and, of course, there are the usual Wodehousian references to or quotations from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Lord Tennyson and Publishers Knopf, Holt, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster-all balled up together...
...march for a free Ireland." Dispatched to London on a secret mission to recover a canvas of the late Spanish painter, Afrodisio Lafuente y Chaos, that the Dublin press has loudly and incorrectly trumpeted as Ireland's own, Tommy promptly funks it and is rescued by a Wodehousian young Englishman named Felix Horniman. Chiefly because Tommy reminds him of a dyspeptic monkey he once befriended in India, Felix casually pinches the picture for him, and the two of them make off for Dublin. The rest of Novelist Tracy's book is a Waughtered-down Irish stew...
Cocktail Time ("A Novel about a Novel"), the latest of Wodehouse's 76 books, shares with its predecessors the Wodehousian characteristic of being strictly up to date in time and half a century behind in taste. Its characters display, as always, what Essayist John W. Aldridge calls ''the miraculous capacity of the human body to operate without the assistance of any mental powers whatever." Among the 15-odd starters...