Word: humbug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...quarrel with his view of history, as he himself cheerfully admits. "I represent an extreme minority view," he says. "I'm trying to overcome the idea that heredity doesn't matter, that all behavior is social, that it's the result of education-the whole general humbug." Like controversial Psychologist Arthur Jensen (TIME, April 11), he is astonished at the willingness of educators to assume that all their students arrive in class with approximately equal intellectual endowments. Any test of this, in his opinion, invariably demolishes the assumption. "Some people are teachable and others...
Wisely, Author Haight contents himself with chronicling his heroine's dazzling success in her own time. By the 1860s, the lady whom George Eliot unkindly referred to as "our little humbug of a Queen" was reading her books aloud to Prince Albert. Proper people were inviting her to dinners (she often declined). World rights to her books had brought in ?41,000, in buying power the Victorian equivalent of a cool million dollars. After Dickens' death in 1870, she was revered, quite simply, as the greatest novelist alive...
Died. Patrick Kavanagh, 62, Irish poet; of pneumonia; in Dublin. Better known for his acid tongue than for his lyric poetry, Kavanagh found modern poetry "pretentious," Emerson "a sugary humbug," Yeats "You can have him." Yet Ireland knew him as one of its strongest talents for such works as "The Great Hunger...
...last two aspects of his talent are most in evidence in The Trials of Brother Jero and The Strong Breed, though the two one-acters rank among his lesser plays. Brother Jero is a broad spoof of a religious humbug, a con man of prophecy who lives by mulcting his worshipers, or "customers," as he calls them in moments of absent-minded lucidity. He preys on their hopes, fears and vices, his own trial and joy being inveterate womanizing...
...Slob, Humbug & Jealousy. Volcanic in origin, the islands are a myriad of forms and sizes ranging from a barren cay to agricultural St. Croix, which is 26 miles long and up to six miles wide. St. Thomas offers the bustle of Charlotte Amalie, the islands' capital city, as well as ancient forts and quaint Danish architecture. St. Croix, quieter and less populated, boasts a rain forest and an arid, cactus-studded bluff, wildlife (deer, quail), a profusion of tropical fruit from papaya to pineapples, a golf course, and old plantations with such calypso names as "Slob," "Humbug" and "Jealousy...