Word: would
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...work on children's books inhabit a sort of literary shtetl," says Sendak. "When I won a prize for Wild Things, my father spoke for a great many critics when he asked whether I would now be allowed to work on 'real' books." It is a complaint voiced by almost all his colleagues. Their books may be of shorter than usual length, and child centered. But they are not childish, and most are as serious as any adult novel or history. It was because of the patronizing attitudes that greeted her work that Beatrix Potter denied creating...
...cheerful creatures in one of his best-known books recall adult visitors almost half a century ago: "They'd say, 'You're so cute I could eat you up.' And I knew if my mother didn't hurry up with the cooking, they probably would. So, on one level at least, you could say that the Wild Things are Jewish relatives." At first those relatives were not encouraging to young Maurice. He remembers being "a miserable kid who excelled neither scholastically nor athletically." But he could draw, and he could read. When...
...There is, of course, a kind of nickname that does not stem from a desire for familiarity. Sobriquet is a more ceremonial word for nickname (sort of a nickname's given name), but it is generally used in a formal, titular sense, and not as anything one actually would call someone else. A nickname may be at once demeaning and endearing (see New Zealand's Prime Minister, "Piggy" Muldoon). But a sobriquet keeps its distance. Attila's of for example, were alternately "The Terror of the World" and "The Scourge of God," depending on his be havior...
...should be said too that there are public figures whose bearing simply does not lend itself to nicknames. It is hard to imagine that the French would ever refer to their leader as Val. And Mrs. Gandhi is surely nothing but Indira to her friend...
...whole, however, people will fight through a for bidding given name, especially when they want to make some one more vivid hi their minds. Where would baseball be without Goose, hockey without Boom Boom, football without Mean Joe? Common criminals would sound like common criminals were there no Machine Gun, Killer or Mad Dog among them. Not that all gangster names are so picturesque. Nathan Kaplan's monicker was "Kid Dropper" for reasons too awful to contemplate. And Al Capone was known as the Millionaire Gorilla, though it is hard to picture some floozie chucking him under the chin...