Word: overheards
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...1860s Mark Twain wrote a humorous column for the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nev., about a horse that tried to eat a boy on his way to Sunday school ("The boy got loose, you know, but that old hoss got his bible and some tracts ..."). Twain overheard somebody laughing at it and decided to write more columns, all just as hilarious as the first...
This grim picture of the winter holidays accumulated in psychological literature and passed, during the last generation, into the popular domain. These days it can be casually overheard around almost any office, street corner or watering hole. Indeed, many Americans have begun to sound, and a few to act, as though the appropriate way to navigate the holidays is with a clipboard and psychiatric checklist for keeping track of casualties...
...husband can't walk with a broken leg. The doctor? He had a motive, which Poirot overheard while eavesdropping, but he seems too weakwilled to kill. The Marxist--who Poirot heard saying in a just world Ridgeway "would be killed as a warning to the others"--possible, but unlikely. The maid, who discovered the body, might have done it, since Ridgeway would not give her her salary and let her go to meet her husband-to-be. How about the socialite, who might have done it to get the pearls, which are discovered missing? Who knows...
Such discussion only added to the pressures on the assembled Cardinals to consider both health and age more significant in their decision than either had been before. In Rome, a Cardinal was overheard reporting, "I'm over 70. But I feel great. I've got a good pulse, and blood pressure...
...stubbornness was justified. Late in 1965 a Putnam editor stopped in at Magazine Management's offices, overheard Puzo telling Mafia yarns and offered a $5,000 advance for a book about the Italian underworld. The rest is publishing history?and American sociology. Puzo's saga of blood and money, treachery and revenge, class injury and ferocious pride, is one of the most gripping stories in modern popular fiction. Despite its cast of venal monsters and hired killers, The Godfather offered a nostalgic view of the embattled family defending and enriching itself in a ruthless world. Don Corleone even became...