Word: wretch
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...finds them there, locks them up, and by the time the war ends the sentimental old wretch has grown so fond of his two prisoners that he decides to keep them as pets. Soberly, he fakes reports from the battle zones ("London is pffft") while the tumult of German reconstruction gets under way outside, sounding conveniently like the thunder of guns...
...mired, many an author falls back on a reliable device. He hauls his characters (and the reader) into church, and there, cloaked in clerical robes, delivers a sermon that sets everybody straight on what the novel is about. By extraordinary coincidence, literary sermons are always marvelously germane: no hero-wretch taken in adultery is ever made to sit through a discourse on the nature of the Holy Ghost...
...mill flattery includes tape-recording the professor's lectures, pretending to shift one's major to his field, and inviting the wretch to speak at one sorority house after another. One Northwestern sociologist finds graduate students going in for the "Gemeinschaft attitude"-getting folksy through baby sitting, for example. This puts them on almost unassailable ground: "How can a teacher flunk someone his kids like...
...Vice Wretch...
...enormous") feat, a one-man job ("a low word now much in use") comprising 2,300 folio pages of definitions and examples accomplished in nine years (from 1746 to 1755), with the help of only six copyists. Only a fopdoodle ("a fool") or a slubberdegullion ("a paltry, dirty, sorry wretch") would deny the greatness of the work, and only one who had carried it out had the right to define a lexicographer (as Johnson did in the dictionary) as "a harmless drudge." Privately, he was not so humble. As he told his Boswell: "I knew very well what...