Word: wits
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years ago a British wit named Stephen Potter published a little book called The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship (TIME, Sept. 6, 1948)-a waggish study of how to win games "without actually cheating." Last week, in School and Society, a U.S. dean did much the same thing for "Academic Respectability"-how to attain it without actually knowing how to teach. If members of the profession will only follow a few simple rules, writes Dean H. T. Morse of the University of Minnesota's General College, such respectability is assured...
Somehow the spiritual needs of the prisoners were filled. A Jesuit priest managed to grant absolutions and perform clandestine Mass each day for Roman Catholic prisoners. Lilje and other Protestant pastors wrote meditations and commentaries to be passed around. Among the most heroic were the Jehovah's Wit nesses. Owing to their "absolute love of truth, the Gestapo were glad to use these men in various prisons as informers, for in their love of truth they always went so far that they disregarded all ties of comradeship ... In spite of this, we owe them that respect which we would...
...bedtime when the new governess arrived. The little girl sat up in her bed, looked the lady over, and spoke her mind: "Why have you no hair?" Miss Crawford had hair and proved it by taking off her hat. She also had tact, wit and a will beneath the hat, and proved it thereafter in one of the toughest assignments in the British Empire. For the next 16 years (until 1949), "Crawfie's" job was to teach the outspoken little girl and her tart-tongued sister their respective places - as royal princesses of the world's greatest monarchy...
...begin to be seriously afraid," wrote Jane, "that his Life of Cromwell is going to have the same strange fate as the child of a certain French marchioness that I once read of, which never could get itself born, tho' carried about in her for 20 years. . . A wit is said to have once asked this poor woman if 'Madame was not thinking of swallowing a tutor for her son?' So one might ask Carlyle if he is not thinking of swallowing a publisher for his book...
...every page there are little examples of the discernment and wit that Jane poured into epigrams, maxims and observations on everyday life. A minor classic is her description of the waiters at an Oxford hotel-"all large elderly men [whose] sort of 'mazed abstractedness and sad gravity . . . gave one a notion they must have some time or other been unsuccessful graduates...