Word: straits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Brightest bit of fantasy was the work of an expatriated Englishman named O'Connor Barrett, who had to outgrow a strait-laced start. Barrett's strict parents had talked Latin at dinner, limiting their conversation almost entirely to religion. In 1923, when he was 15, Barrett went to work in a furniture factory and subsequently carved hundreds of Chippendale chair legs. Says he: "Oh, how I hate Chippendale!" There was no Chippendale influence in his squatly intense Stalemate, which looked like a couple of ancients so intent on a game of chess that their bodies knottily reflected...
...rest of Caldwell's characters are off the same near-caricature assembly line as Molly and Lily. For the perennial Jeeter-type there is Jethro, Putt's shiftless farmhand brother. The strait-laced minister's young wife has "vitamin" binges with Molly on the sly, finally runs off with a salesman. "He [Rev. Bigbee] won't even let me undress without turning out the lights, and I have to wear long-sleeved nightgowns that drag the floor. This morning as soon as he left I took off all my clothes and ran out into the backyard...
Home in a Strait Jacket. Desertions from all ranks of the Red Army were so numerous that Russian border guards had been doubled. Berlin saw a typical tragedy. When young Red Army Senior Lieut. Alexis Kovalev was ordered back to Russia, he slashed his wrists. But he was rushed to one of Berlin's American hospitals and recovered. He pleaded for help to get to the U.S. zone. Because of a U.S.Russian agreement to return each other's soldiery, his pleas were vain. When Red Army MPs came for him, Kovalev fought until they clapped a strait jacket...
...past decade and longer, the feminine fashion silhouette, far from following the natural lines of the figure, has been rigidly molding it into lines that are not only unnatural, but what is worse, unfeminine. Hips were strait-jacketed to nothingness; no one was supposed to have more bosom than an adolescent girl; the shoulders exaggerated and monstrous...
Ohio's century-old Marietta College was founded by strait-laced Congregationalists, and it has never quite cottoned to some of the newfangled freedoms. Marietta's trustees didn't like it when President William A. Shimer, 53, got a divorce a year ago. They disapproved even more when Shimer began courting Dean of Women Dorothy Blair, 36, and someone printed on the wall outside his house: "Dottie loves Willie-Willie loves Dottie...