Word: gossip
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Rockefeller Revolution. Italians said the supermarket could never succeed, and for long years the arguments sounded convincing: the housewife would never surrender the personal pleasure of bargaining down prices with the neighborhood shopkeeper, maids would not forego their leisurely gossip sessions in the marketplace, clerks and customers would steal the counters bare (as they did in a small-scale experiment with a self-service store in Milan in 1949). But after Romans stampeded the big U.S. supermarket set up under the direction of Grand Union's President Lansing P. Shield at an international food congress in Rome...
...Maritain, "all this talk about American materialism is no more than a curtain of silly gossip and slander." He coolly measures U.S. attitudes by materialist standards and finds that the label simply will not fit: "America is not egoist; for the common consciousness of America, egoism is shameful . . . There is no avarice in the American cast of mind. The American people are neither squeamish nor hypocritical about the importance of money in the modern world . . . The average European cares about money as well as the average American, but he tries to conceal the fact, for he has been accustomed...
...mixture of French and Spanish, with a trace of Negro and Indian now and again, they live on the Isle aux Chiens in the Gulf of Mexico. The kids run in packs; no one seems to mind the casual sleeping around, and gossip is the bloodstream of social life. When the men are not fishing or working on their boats, they drink and brawl. As Catholics, they sometimes go to the church at a mainland town and give a welcome of sorts to the priest when he visits the island. But tempers are quick, violence is always near the surface...
Terrebonne putters around, dreams of the old days and is never surprised by island foolishness because she has seen it all before. And always there is gossip and long-winded conversation that bring to mind a remark once made by Author Grau: "If I get hold of something that seems to be flowing, I can work all day long...
...Left. These notes have all the casual aspect of horror encountered in nightmares. One account records, in the midst of gossip about prices, the story of a baby thrown from a refugee train. Another tells of "benzine poured over a young Jew" and fired. So common was death in the ghetto courtyards that the dead lay unburied, and children were seen at a game of "tickling the corpse...