Word: yarn
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With this barefaced situation, English Novelist Bates carries on as if the plot about the beautiful native girl had never been written before. An ex-R.A.F. officer himself, he wrote a homely yarn of flyers in The Cruise of the Breadwinner (TIME, March 10). The Purple Plain is a routine mission of romance and adventure. Flying by dead reckoning, Pilot Bates keeps on a hack's course with the skill of a fair minor novelist until he has deposited his hero quietly in bed with his girl...
...yarn it spins out, in a thin, reedy voice, is the one about the lamb fallen among wolves: innocent, upright French Schoolmaster Topaze (nicely played by Oscar Karlweis) is used as a dupe by a high-class swindler and his very French mistress. But after a while Topaze begins to get the hang of things. Inevitably, he also gets the very French lady...
...papers did their best to keep the popular excitement at fever pitch by printing at least one new fact about the wedding every day. There was news of gifts, each one more fantastic than the last: a grand piano from the R.A.F.; a doily from Mohandas Gandhi, made of yarn spun by the old saint himself; 1,500 cans of lard from the residents of Eritrea; jeweled anklets and a statue of Siva from the Dominion of India; an ivory casket from Pakistan; a traveling bag made of elephants' ears from the women of Kenya; a spirited yearling from...
Billy Rose might have used the same excuse for dishing out this chestnut as if it were fresh-roasted. If he had been reading rival Columnist Leonard Lyons last February he would have known better. In one week, six people had offered twists of the same yarn to Lennie-eleven years after he had first "naively printed" the tale. And only a week before Billy printed it, Lyons had again tagged it a legend...
...first week Billy sounded like a not-too-assured mixture of Walter Winchell and the late Alexander Woollcott. He let his listeners in on his random thoughts, a bit of philosophy, some gossip. He did a little crusading for higher salaries for teachers. He told a yarn about World's Fair days, when J. Edgar Hoover put the finger on a gangster who was bothering Billy. He bemoaned all the big-time stars that he has been dope enough to pass...