Word: names
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...become a Mississippi-steamboat pilot. It was a job he held just briefly, but the memory of the river, its enchantments and dangers, found its way years later into his most powerful book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It also found its way into his pen name. Mark Twain, the name he began to write under in 1863, was a river man's term meaning a depth of two fathoms...
...more than "merely" a humorist. So by 1873 he had rolled out his first novel, The Gilded Age, which he co-wrote with a Connecticut journalist, Charles Dudley Warner. With that book's title, Twain gave the post--Civil War era, a time of boundless greed and opportunism, the name it still has and that it shares, in some quarters, with the era we seem to be willy-nilly emerging from...
Shortly after becoming President, Roosevelt made news by declaring, out of the blue, that "In God We Trust" should be removed from U.S. coins because they "carried the name of God into improper places." Twain responded, in conversation with Carnegie, that "In God We Trust" was a fine motto, "simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well--In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true...
...single-minded polemic. It registers the horror of lynchings but also undertakes to empathize with people who attended them. Their motivation, Twain argued, is not inhuman viciousness but "man's commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the commanding feature of the make...
...three years. Texas passed its version last fall. It is popular in part because it's a hybrid of two simple and deeply American concepts: your home is your castle, and you have a right to defend yourself and your property. The laws have different details and sometimes different names from place to place (some states go for a more macho name - Stand Your Ground - while others prefer the snarkier Make...