Word: mudding
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...history, Jim Curley's Harvard History begins before the turn of the century in the day when a few of the boys at Pete Whalen's cigar store talked him into running for Boston's Common Council. Old Ward 17, an immigrant district which included City Hospital and the Mud Flats, had been devotedly tended by tight-fisted Pea-Jacket Maguire who had only recently been hoodwinked into giving up his patronage for the honorific and powerless post of Democratic City Commission Chairmen by John F. Dever, the Uncle of the late Governor. Dever's position was not yet secure...
...Hoboken English is ugly, as perhaps the accent of the French slums is not. Certainly the former seems unworthy of the vivid vigor of Genet's purple passages: "Snowball's a well-built guy. If you like, he's a Green Eyes with a smokescreen. Green Eyes covered with mud. Green Eyes in the dark..." That's not the way they talk in Hoboken. Genet, however, has no commitment to consistency, and the contrast between the beauty of his lines and the squalor of the accents in which it is spoken might be exactly what he was aiming...
...Mud Month...
Author Leon Wolff, a World War II airman, draws a memorable picture of stiff, inarticulate Field Marshal Haig, who racked up about 450,000 British casualties (some 150.000 killed) in five months in order to capture a few miles of mud. Haig was an old-fashioned cavalryman who was mentally saddlebound in the kind of war in which a good deep hole was a soldier's best friend. One of his dictums alone should have disqualified him for command: Bullets, he said, had "little stopping power against the horse...
Haig never got a chance to use his beloved cavalry effectively. The horses not only failed as bullet stoppers, but they suffered almost as much from mud and barbed wire as the men. The tanks that Haig despised ripped through the Hindenburg Line with trifling losses, but by that time Haig's reserves were used up and he had no follow-through. Flanders was a sickening campaign, and Author Wolff's clear, cool account effectively re-creates its horror. Perhaps the last word falls to Haig's chief of staff. Lieut. General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, who, according...