Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Young Sinners reveals Raymond Guion as a young libertine who regains his wind and his principles in the Adirondacks. Playwright Elmer Harris has made a bid for the prurient trade with a sex lecture more graphic than graceful...
...country. The social lesson is thus outmoded. If the author were to have lectured in the U. S. on the incompatibility of nobles and peasants, few would pay to attend. It is as a psychologist, as the creator of the shrewd Generalin, the love-loving Fraulein Bork, the prurient children, the smug Baron, the fearfully respectable Baroness, highly-principled Hans, class-bound Frau Grill, that Author Keyserling excites greatest admiration...
...word that shocked Critic Stevens was a Latin-derived synonym for stage-hackneyed Sex-a synonym seldom heard outside biology. TIME approved the word's scientific quality and doubts that the most prurient-minded of Victorian butlers would have suspected what was meant...
...trite story of a backstage Don Juan; actually its purpose was to exploit, not study, homosexualism in its most blatant form. A party was given on the stage by one pervert for his fellows; here Mae West provided her actors with shrill obscenities to shriek. The audience, more prurient even than the playwright, found these interludes funny or exciting; they laughed with weird crescendoes...
Such behavior may now seem frivolous and insane to all civilized persons; it would have seemed totally incredible to any Greek, at the time when the unknown sculptor made his statue. To the wise Greeks, who lacked the prurient estheticism of modern magazine cover art, the male face or figure was, in its more austere and tempered contours, perhaps a trifle more beautiful than its female counterpart. Either one, when dexterously transmuted into marble, could be regarded with an impersonal regard for its objective beauty. They, the sculptor himself, would not have regarded the performance of Greenville's citizens...