Word: yorkerism
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...written history of U.S. presidential campaigns is speckled with many a remarkable asterisk, not the least of which does homage to women. There is, for example, a bosomy young New Yorker named Victoria Claflin Woodhull, who ran for the presidency in 1872 as the Equal Rights Party candidate. Victoria billed herself as a Wall Street "businesswoman," publicly proclaimed her belief in spiritualism, vegetarianism, short skirts, legalized prostitution and free love. On election night she was in jail on an obscenity charge. She got very few votes. Ulysses Grant beat her out. Then there is Washington, D.C.'s Belva...
...consonants for every number, which can then be combined with vowels (which are placed so that they don't register) to translate any combination of digits into an easily remembered phrase. Thus the number of the CIA-351-1100-becomes AH ME, CUBA BAY, OY. The New Yorker who wants to call A.T. & T. to complain about all-digit dialing dials GO WAG A WET YOYO...
...Yorker mentions the name Wagner to a bartender, all he is likely to get is a growl. But if a citizen of the French city of Dijon mentions the name of his mayor to a waiter in a bistro, he gets an aperitif made of three-fourths dry white wine, one-fourth Crème de Cassis. The kir is Dijon's tribute to the Rev. Félix Kir, the improbable Roman Catholic priest who is mayor of this city...
...Selective Service authorities in New York and Justice Department officials in Washington, Daniel Seeger presented a baffling problem. A New Yorker of draft age, Seeger claimed exemption as a conscientious objector, but he was an unusual sort of c.o. Although raised in a Roman Catholic family (two of his uncles became priests), he was a self-styled agnostic who refused to say he believed in a Supreme Being. The Selective Service Act makes it unmistakably clear that no one is to be exempted from the draft as a c.o. unless he holds to a "belief in a relation...
...fact, Cheever is an old-fashioned moralist, and would be claimed as kin by that Old Lady from Dubuque for whom The New Yorker Magazine is not edited, but where, ironically, the bulk of his work has appeared. Old-fashioned abstractions that have almost been jostled out of intellectual currency-words like humility, goodness, pride, honor and love-constantly appear in his work. This has baffled some readers dazzled by the deceptively brilliant surface texture and the sort of knowing social-insider's stylishness that will set a time period with: "Now that was the year when the squirrels...