Word: bitefuls
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...thou English by Writer Catherine Van Dyke, the Letter tells how Claudia's son Pilo had his withered foot cured by Jesus. Overcome, Claudia tries to convert her husband to faith in Christ, but Pilate is an intellectual, and a nut about philosophy, and won't bite. From her vantage point near Herod's Palace, Claudia describes Christ's passion in gory detail: "Jesus, bound to a pillar, and standing in a red pool of his own blood." After the Crucifixion, Pilate loses favor with Rome, and ends his life a sick pauper, trembling...
...alarmed eye on the Journal, whose prestrike circulation of 601,625 paced the afternoon field, the Telegram (442,936) piously proclaimed that it would offer "no gimmicks," then promptly announced an armful: a new contest, a new "space-age" comic strip, a dog column "that interprets barks with a bite." The Post, which had more than doubled its circulation to 750,000 by returning to print three weeks before the others, made little effort to match its rivals' fancy footwork and slipped quietly back to third in the three-paper P.M. race...
There were a lot of things Johnson did not know. A tarantula is not "an insect whose bite is only cured by musick"; a cassowary is not a bird of prey; and only a jack pudding or zany would believe that pygmies are devoured by cranes. Whether today's lexicographers are wiser is another matter. Johnson may not have known what a masochist was (the eponymous Herr von Masoch had not yet been born to give his name to those who find pleasure in their own pain), but Lexicographer Johnson had a word for the type...
...when I put the bite, my friends...
...Stein recognizes that it also contains a rueful hint of cultural extinction. This is not to suggest that Enter Laughing is a social document, but merely that its solid sense of social place and time (the Depression) gives an evening of frequently paralyzing laughter an element of true comic bite...