Word: bookworm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...murk of the London slums, as he tells it himself, arose a "bloody bookworm" named Fred Bason. At 15, Fred already had his own library, consisting of Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson, Liza of Lambeth, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Pears' Cyclopædia, the 1881 volume of the Strand magazine, Wild Wales and Two Years Before the Mast. He was much happier browsing through this library than he was lathering the "filthy faces [of] nasty old men" in a slum barbershop (his first job) or eating "sawdust and chips" at "the wrong end of a planing machine...
...cleaned them up and hawked some of them around the second-hand shops in a sack. At day's end, Bookseller Bason had made enough profit (15s. 8d.) to convince him that a load of second-hand books and some stout burlap were all a true bookworm needed to "make a living and be free...
...issued called Time, more or less along the lines of your TIME, featuring articles and sketches that were then of current interest. I understand that copies of that old print are now very rare indeed. I have, however, looked through one, as a friend of mine who is a bookworm has a copy which he values highly. There is a sharp contrast between the TIME of today and the Time of the other days...
Ronald Colman plays Beauregard Bottomley, an omniscient bookworm who is convinced that radio's money-splurging quiz shows threaten the U.S. with "intellectual destruction," and sets out to strike a blow for intellectual salvation. An expert who can't be stumped, he appears on Soap Manufacturer Vincent Price's double-ornothing program week after week, letting his winnings pile up with the plan of taking over the whole $40-million soap company. When the alarmed hucksters try to give him what he has already won and get rid of him, a hero-loving public refuses...
Carroll) fostered the fad of the portmanteau word (samples: chortle, combining chuckle and snort; galumph, to gallop triumphantly). But by & large, students have always been the real wordmakers. Sometimes, indeed, their words have become English. Among them: blazer, sophomore and constitutional-originally a bookworm's form of exercise...