Word: pruning
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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People can be classified under three heads, which will get rid of the objectionable "fascinating". There are "linnets" (this is highly complimentary and has a pleasanter sound than "fascinating" anyway); there are 'pones" (this combines all the contemptuousness of "drone" with the heavy odium of "prune"); and there are "grusks" (any man would curl up and wither if he were called a "grusk" out of a clear...
...scholar has long had the fate to be efficient in university administration: he could make one pink card do what two blue cards had done before; he could chart the careers of professors and plot the curves of deans; he could embroider academic records in beautiful sampler designs, and prune, if need be, catalogues and committee reports into the most lovely shapes--hearts, crosses, pyramids, love-knots. Because he could do this he was made to do it, though he regularly protested. But after years of protest and endurance he has--if we may be pardoned a not wholly academic...