Word: pruning
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...from eating between meals (no "pies, lies [or] doughnuts at Wellesley," Founder Durant had warned). By 1900 she wanted to be a Gibson girl, and a few years later, to the horror of her elders, she began sewing in class, missing vesper service and using such unseemly words as "prune," "pill," and "nifty...
...16th Century, gambling dens and houses of assignation were flourishing. Some of them, "as in Mayfair today," were luxurious places that featured excellent free dinners. The fancy houses offered "refreshment of a special kind with a view to its effect-as stewed prunes . . . oyster pies; muscadine; raw eggs; wine with a sprig of bugloss." For those who could not afford the "stewed-prune" houses, there were "strolling damsels...
...lasts only five years in office. Bob Sproul is still going strong after 17, and it is not for lack of other offers ("They're getting to be a nuisance"). Sproul has declined the presidency of the Anglo California National Bank (at $50,000), the presidency of the Prune and Apricot Growers, the directorship of Selective Service, candidacy for the Republican nomination for senator and governor. His biggest temptation came last January...
Billy does ridicule, but only halfheartedly, the life he leads. "My only exercise," he once jeered contentedly, "is a brisk walk to the bathroom." Until recently, he dodged the sun: "I should get wrinkled. What am I, a prune?" Every week he puts away handfuls of costly chocolates, most of which have long since settled in a small bulge in the middle of his 5 ft. 3 in., 140-lb. frame. Billy's skin has a worn, beige look, grading to blue under his quick, cold eyes...
Economists, No. The ploughman has a better chance than the lean, tired man who says apologetically: "I think I could learn how to prune vines or do some kind of farm work. I haven't had the experience, of course, because I have always been a professor of economics...