Word: mid-19th
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Declining Imports. Cant got its second big push in the mid-19th Century, when U.S. cons, doxies, hoboes and fingers stopped importing so much from abroad. Since then, U.S. cant has grown so rapidly that today it is "numerically larger than the British"-and still so wildly prolific that just before his book went to press, hardworking Lexicographer Partridge ordered a batch of addenda bound in to catch such sprouts, new to him, as winchell (a swindler's victim), boodled (loaded with cash), cooties' reveille (lights-out in the cells), hoochie-papping (stealing another man's girl...
Take a Type. It is a minor literary phenomenon of the mid-20th Century that novels in the style of the mid-19th should still be hugely popular. And it is plainly uncanny that such a writer as Novelist Goudge, with almost nothing to say, and small style to say it with, should be the one to write them. What is the secret of Author Goudge's success? Gentian Hill, her latest novel and the Literary Guild's first offer of the new year, can be studied as a casebook of her method...
...some ways best, painting in the show was a tumultuous Wild Animal Hunt by Bernard Lorjou, who, at 40, is considered a promising "young" painter in France and has never exhibited in the U.S. To some mid-20th Century eyes, Lorjou's Hunt might look like a wild burlesque of one by Delacroix. But in the mid-19th Century, Delacroix' own hunt pictures had seemed like parodies of Rubens'. Lorjou's muscular distortions and crackling, fiery colors were more emotional than artful, yet there was art in them as well...
...artists named Maurer had shows in Manhattan. One was a 99-year-old curiosity, spruce and sprightly Louis Maurer, the last living Currier & Ives illustrator, whose traditional sporting prints and genre scenes had sold like hotcakes in the mid-19th Century. The other was slender, sad-eyed Alfred, his 62-year-old bachelor son, who painted hard-to-sell pictures of elongated, wistful shop girls and abstractions of heads and still lifes that were anything but traditional. Papa Maurer's show was a huge success to which son Alfy's was little more than a half-noticed footnote...
...choice items in Editor Linscott's basket is an account of how mid-19th Century Boston was rocked by scandal: the only known instance in which a Harvard professor committed murder. A Harvard janitor, one Littlefield, achieved immortality of a sort by nabbing the murderer, who had buried his victim in a vault under his chemistry laboratory. As he dug into the wall of the vault, related Littlefield, "the first thing I saw was the pelvis of a man and two parts of a leg." With appropriate Harvard restraint, the janitor added: "I knew this was no place...