Word: maides
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...About a maid I'll sing a song...
...working day, and now makes around $30,000 a year. Her hard-working day starts every morning at 5:30 a.m. when she makes out a daily schedule for herself, often beginning with an early-morning stop at the food markets. At her East Side Manhattan apartment (where the maid does almost all the cooking), she stocks 3,000 cookbooks, keeps ten filing cabinets full of notes ("If I'm writing on blueberries, I look into my file. Robert Frost. If I want to quote. I can quote"), is now working to complete a book of her own titled...
When Samuel Richardson wrote the first modern English novel, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, a 1740 tearjerker about an innocent serving maid and her lecherous master, most of London enjoyed a good cry. But the plight of Pamela Andrews, often fighting with her back to the bedroom wall, seems to have given Richardson's friend and fellow-novelist, Henry Fielding (Tom Jones), a hearty laugh instead, or at least the idea for a bawdy satire. Within six months, he pseudonymously penned An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, a short but exact parody* written, like Pamela...
Historian Jacques Barzun of Columbia University is one professor who does not mind getting from his window cleaner a note like this: "The windows have been cleaned Wed. 12:30 p.m. Your maid was their to veryfey the statement." That sort of thing, says Barzun in the Atlantic Monthly, may be bad writing, but it is nevertheless harmless. The real danger to language "does not come from such trifles. It comes rather from the college-bred millions who . . . circulate the prevailing mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax that passes for prose." Barzun calls this "the infinite duplication...
Putting its best hunch forward, the Metropolitan Opera signed Vienna's buxom Soprano Irmgard Seefried this season. Last week she bowed as Susanna, the maid in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro, and turned out to be the hit of the evening. She bounced around as a properly improper young peasant girl, conniving enthusiastically, clucking her disapproval of other people's peccadilloes, escaping from her own tight jams, seeming to enjoy every minute. Almost from the moment of her entrance, she had the Met audience laughing in delight...