Word: preening
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Harvard is run by a businessman mentality. Its academics are sick with manufacturing, publish, and Potomac fever. Professors sit on their Harvardness and preen before Time and the New York Times who publish vanity as sincerity and academic conjecture as fact. The Harvard degree seems to insure that you will never have to deal with stupidity as you learn to handle power. For all too many, the Harvard degree has become an affliction for themselves and for others ("There is no role for the white liberal. He is our affliction"--James Baldwin...
Hard drinks were not served, but punch and champagne - California Almaden-flowed adequately. After the final Johnson years, when business suits were the accepted dress at congressional receptions, the legislators seemed eager to preen in black tie and whatever. Senator Strom Thurmond showed up in a rusty red dinner jacket that about matched his hair. Senator Jacob Javits sported what he jokingly referred to as his "basic black by Bill Blass...
...blunderer, but the one thing he understands far better than his indifferent friends is the true nature of Hitler's mania. The Jew and Gentile gathered to hear Toscanini conduct Fidelia cling to the illusion that Austria is protected by some ineluctable immunity. But after watching his barber preen in his new National Socialist uniform, and after seeing the troopers take over the best restaurants, Stanley knows that he must get out. He realizes that the society that obsesses him is committing suicide...
Ordinarily, the Paris-Match building crackles with Gallic electricity as Europe's best-paid, most buoyant journalists exclaim over their latest exploits, argue about politics and shout out the window to pretty girls who preen in a cafe across the street in the hope that they may get their pictures in the magazine. But last week a heavy silence settled on Paris-Match. Staffers moved listlessly, speaking in low, conspiratorial whispers. An idle copy boy watched over the managing editor's office while its usual occupant, Andre Lacaze, appeared at the entrance to the building, waving an envelope...
...plumages are changing so fast that the lads hardly have time to preen their feathers any more. Now it's the Gaucho look-or at least it is for Rudolf Nureyev, 30. Not that Rudi is all that wild about horses. It's just that he has this gas about things South American; so naturally that led to an Yves St. Laurent Argentine pony-skin jacket to set off a dashing pair of matching boots by Paris' Roger Vivier. Gaucho Rudi wears the getup whenever the mood strikes him, as with Dame Margot Fonteyn and Princess Margaret...