Word: prurient
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Under such headings as "Don'ts" Every Girl Should Know, How to Attract a Husband, Lures Men Can't Resist, she chatters of the business of mating in the lower brackets with the kindly solicitude of a slightly prurient older sister and a hard-boiled realism that would do credit to a brothel-keeper. Sample Dix advice to the nubile: "A young girl who lets any one boy monopolize her simply shuts the door in the face of good times and her chances of making a better match. . . . The wise girl keeps a wary eye out to note...
Every Day's A Holiday (Paramount). In the peculiar idiom of show business, Mae West's art comes under the head of umph. This quality is expressed by sinuous gyrating and prurient murmurings. That this sort of thing will make money is well established. Actress West's last recorded cinema earnings (1936) were $323,000, about as much salary as Bethlehem Steel's president, Eugene G. Grace, and the chairman of its board, Charles M. Schwab, draw down together. That umph sometimes shocks the public is established...
...Among startling unlocked for discoveries were X-rays, natural radioactivity, artificial radioactivity. X-rays caused such a furor among laymen after their discovery by Roentgen that the New Jersey Legislature introduced a law forbidding their use in opera glasses, for fear that prurient individuals would be able to see through the garments of ladies...
...Gentleman Jockey Crawford Burton, twice winner of the dangerous Maryland Hunt Cup, posing in his racing silks as an endorser of Camel cigarets' recuperative powers. By a horrible mischance, the photograph of Mr. Burton, holding his saddle and girth, reproduced in such a manner that to a prurient or imaginative eye it appeared to show Mr. Burton indecently exposed as only a man could be exposed...
When Crawford Burton, who is a stockbroker when not riding, showed up next day at the New York Stock Exchange, he found that its notoriously prurient members had so chosen to interpret his picture. When Mr. Burton entered the Exchange smoking room, he said that scores of brokers began to brandish copies of Collier's (one of the first publications to receive and print the advertisement) and set up such a gibbering that he could execute no orders, went home to seclude himself for days...