Word: cuspidor
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...appear in the proper sequence; duoliteral is one of the even fewer in which they all appear backward. Kinnikinnik, he reports, is not only an Indian smoking mixture of bark and leaves but the longest palindrome among the 450,000 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Cuspidor is the word that James Joyce declared to be the most beautiful in the entire language...
Finally the first event, for accuracy, begins. A range of plywood sheets covered with butcher paper is laid out. Official Scorer Johnny Little, known as "the keeper of the cuspidor," cautions: "No licorice or other foreign matter mixed in." One by one the spitters toe the line, legs spread. They draw two fingers to the ends of their mouths, rock back like drawn bowstrings and let fly toward a distant spittoon. Don Snyder reaches the finals but loses the accuracy contest to Hulon Craft, a distant nephew of old George. Hulon comes to within 1 ½ inches of a spittoon...
While the ineffable Judge Brown made good use of "a green cuspidor strategically located by his left foot," he rejected virtually every defense objection, say the authors. D.A. Wade successfully introduced Ruby's apparently sane statements after the shooting ("I hope I killed the son of a bitch"), including one that indicated premeditation ("I first planned to kill him at the Friday night press conference"). All of which Belli was forced to explain as "confabulation," by which he meant that the statements were Ruby's effort to rationalize his alleged blackout when he pulled the trigger. Already skeptical...
Anecdotes & Omissions. His book is wonderfully revealing of the sources of his art, which developed the Tramp from the foot-in-the-cuspidor antics of the early two-reelers to the intense tragicomic ironies of those two flawed masterpieces, Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight. But it is uneven and uncommunicative about his many loves and his vociferous left-wing politics, supplying instead great heaps of anecdotes about his encounters with famous people from Einstein and Gandhi to Pablo Casals, Chou Enlai, and Khrushchev...
...self-confidence is very much the image of its deceptively easygoing editor. By newsroom standards, Bill Baggs, 40, makes an ideal boss. He keeps a brass cuspidor within reachable trajectory of his desk, shows visitors the bullet hole that some disgruntled subscriber drilled through his office window, and lets his staffers strut their stuff. "Hell. I don't have much to do," he says, and proves it by writing a daily column and occasional editorials, and by often accompanying his men on out-of-town assignments. "The best ideas that show up in the paper come from guys...