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. . . NICE see "CIVILITY" for related links Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. --Sir James Matthew Barrie (18601937) Scottish writer and dramatist. Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come. --Chinese Proverb Be nice to people on your way up because you might meet 'em on your way down. --Jimmy Durante [James Francis Durante] (18931980) American comedian. If you wish to appear agreeable in society you must consent to be taught many things which you know already. --Johann Kaspar Lavater (17411801) Swiss writer, Protestant pastor, and founder of physiognomics.  . . see: "NAMES" The man hesitated for an instant. "My name is John Robinson," he answered with a sidelong glance. "No, no; the real name," said Holmes sweetly. "It is always awkward doing business with an alias." --Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (18591930) Scottish-born writer of detective fiction. "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" in _Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_ [1892] Nicknames stick to people, and the most ridiculous are the most adhesive. --Thomas C. Haliburton (17961865) Canadian politician, judge, and writer who was best known as the creator of the literary character, Sam Slick. A nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man. --William Hazlitt (17781830) English essayist. ----- sobriquet [SO-brih-kay; -ket; so-brih-KAY; -KET], noun: A nickname; an assumed name; an epithet. . . see: "BED" see: "DREAMS" see: "REST" see: "SLEEP" Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow. --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _Romeo and Juliet_ [15951596] Act II, ii, 184 . . see: WORLD TRADE CENTER & PENTAGON DISASTER, 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 ;void(0)) 1920s . . see "TIME" for related links - Another result of the [1920s social] revolution was that manners became not merely different, but for a few years unmannerly. It was no mere coincidence that during this decade hostesses even at small parties found that their guests couldn't be bothered to speak to them on arrival or departure; that "gate-crashing" at dances became an accepted practice; that thousands of men and women made a point of not getting to dinners within half an hour of the appointed time lest they seem insufficiently blase'; that house parties of flappers and their wide-trousered swains left burning cigarettes on the mahogany tables, scattered ashes light-heartedly on the rugs, took the porch cushions out in the boats and left them there to be rained on, without apology; or that men and women who had had as the old phrase went "advantages" and considered themselves highly civilized, absorbed a few cocktails and straightway turned a dinner party into a boisterous rout, forgetting that a general roughhouse was not precisely the sign of a return to the Greek idea of the good life. The old bars were down, no new ones had been built, and meanwhile the pigs were in the pasture. Some day, perhaps, the ten years which followed the war may aptly be known as the Decade of Bad Manners. --Frederick Lewis Allen (18901954) American author and editor. _Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties_ [1931] - - Given the national mood, it was only appropriate that suddenly, in 1927, the overnight hero of the world was an American. On a drizzly May morning, an airplane lined up on a muddy, primitive runway on Long Island. It was going for a shot at a $25,000 prize for a nonstop transatlantic flight. Of the three contenders, one was both the strangest and the smallest: it was twenty-seven feet, three inches long, had no radio and no sextant, and its instrument panel was less pretentious than that of a 1927 automobile. It had cost $10,580, and every inch of its construction had been carefully watched over by the man who was going to fly it; unlike the others he was going alone, and he did not intend to hop islands or countries, he was going for the whole stretch-New York to Paris. He was a skinny, blond twenty-five-year-old from Minnesota, who had been a parachute jumper and an airmail pilot in the wildcat days. The plane which for balance carried all the gasoline it could in a cased-in cockpit up front, so that the pilot was literally flying blind wobbled and bounced into the heavy skies, and that night forty thousand baseball fans in New York stood and prayed for its pilot. In Tokyo, at their midnight, people swarmed into the streets. The stock exchanges of London, Berlin, and Amsterdam interrupted regular quotations with the word that there was no word. As the second night came on in Paris, an appeal went out to everybody who owned an automobile which might be from seventy to eighty thousand, maybe to head for a landing field at Le Bourget and line up in two files, switch the headlights on and thus create a visible shaft of white fog. Into it, thirty-three hours after just missing the telephone wires on Long Island, the strange plane trundled and stopped. It was engulfed by one hundred thousand Parisians. When they lifted the pilot out of the cockpit, if he had said he was Alexander the Great, they'd have believed him. He reportedly said simply: "I am Charles Lindbergh." He came home to naval salutes and a frenetic press, and a ticker-tape parade up Broadway. The ticker-tape parade was to become New York's special accolade for a few carefully chosen national gods. Down the decades the biggest blizzards have been reserved for such returning heroes as General Eisenhower, General MacArthur, astronaut John Glenn, and, three years after Lindbergh, a sunny, firm-jawed, handsome lawyer from Atlanta, Georgia. A peculiar choice, but in him the 1920s was saluting an old ideal in the moment of its passing. He was Robert Tyre Jones, Jr., a weekend golfer but the best golfer of his time, some people think the best of all time. But had a grace and charm on and off the course that, curiously, made him the idol of two continents in a very brash time, and that to people who didn't know a putter from a shovel. His universal appeal was not as a golfer. What then? The word that comes to mind is an extinct word: a gentleman, a combination of goodness and grace, an unwavering courtesy, self-deprecation, and consideration for other people. This fetching combination, allied to his world supremacy in one sport, was what made him a hero in Scotland and England as much as in the Midwest and his native Georgia. Once, in a national championship, he drove his ball into the woods. He went after it alone, and, in standing to the ball, he barely touched it. He came out of the woods, signaled his fault, penalized himself one stroke and by one stroke lost the championship. When he was praised for this and similar acts of sportmanship, he was genuinely disgusted. "You might as well," he said, "praise a man for not robbing a bank." In his middle forties he was paralyzed by a rare disease, and a friend asked him for the medical outlook. "I will tell you privately," he said "it's not going to get better, it's going to get worse all the time, but don't fret. Remember, we 'play the ball where it lies,' and now let's not talk about this, ever again." And he never did. So what we're talking about is not the hero as golfer but something that America hungered for and found: the best performer in the world who was also the hero as human being, the gentle, chivalrous, wholly self-sufficient male. --Alistair Cooke [Alfred Cooke] (19082004) British-born American broadcater and journalist. _America_ [1973] - ^ Bromodosis (odor caused by foot perspiration) Homotosis (lack of nice furniture) Acidosis (upset stomach) Sneaker Smell Accelerator Toe Office Hips Vacation Knees Ashtray Breath Coalitosis (use of coal, instead of oil, heat) Underarm Offense --New 'diseases' created by 1920s advertising, in Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster _The Century_ [1998] p. 112. ^ The era of wonderful nonsense. --Westbrook Pegler (18841969) American Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and war correspondent. (On the Twenties.) ;void(0)) 1930s . . - Oh, the humanity! --Herbert Morrison (19051989) American broadcaster. The Hindenburg - - What a decade! A riot of appalling folly that suddenly becomes a nightmare, a scenic railway ending in a torture-chamber. It starts off in the hangover of the 'enlightened' post-war age, with Ramsay MacDonald soft -soaping into the micro- phone and the League of Nations flapping vague wings in the background, and it ends up with twenty thousand bombing planes darkening the sky and Himmler's masked executioner whacking women's heads off on a block borrowed from the Nuremberg museum. In between are the politics of the umbrella and the hand-grenade. --George Orwell [Eric Blair] (19031950) English novelist. Reviewing Malcolm Muggeridge _The Thirties_ in "New English Weekly" [April 1940]. When one thinks of the lies and betrayals of those years [the Thirties], the cynical abandonment of one ally after another, the imbecile optimism of the Tory press, the flat refusal to believe that the dictators meant war, even when they shouted it from the house-tops, the inability of the moneyed class to see anything wrong whatever in concentration camps, ghettos, massacres and undeclared wars, one is driven to feel that moral decadence played its part as well as mere stupidity. --George Orwell [Eric Blair] (19031950) English novelist. _Who are the War Criminals?_ in "Tribune" [22 October 1943]. . . see: "SIXTIES (THE)" see "TIME" for related links The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out. --Lance Morrow The word 'conservative' is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naοve, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third- rate decade, the nineteen-sixties. --Norman Tebbit (1931 ) British Conservative politician. In _Independent_ [24 February 1990]. . . see: "(BILL) CLINTON" see TIME for other related links [T]he great boom of the Nineties vastly widened the income gap between America's richest and poorest families. In figures compiled by two respected non-profit and nonpartisan Washington think tanks, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, and made public early in 2000, earnings for the poorest fifth of American families rose less than 1 percent during the decade. At the same time, income for the richest fifth of U.S. families soared 15 percent. It hardly needs to be said that this provides more hard evidence that for all its benefits, the boom was leaving the nation's poor farther behind economically. --Haynes Johnson (1931 ) American journalist; winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. _The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years_ [2001] p. 465 ;void(0)) NOISE . . see: "THE BODY" see: "SOUNDS" see "COMMUNICATION" for other related links This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the queen welcomed him home and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart. --John Aubrey (16261697) English antiquarian and writer. _Brief Lives_ [1898] Fools carry their daggers in their open mouths. --Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (18181885) American humorist. The insignificant, the empty, is usually the loud; and after the manner of a drum, is louder even because of its emptiness. --Thomas Carlyle (17951881) Scottish historian and political philosopher. Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in the execution of them. In springing a mine, that which has done the most extensive mischief makes the smallest report; and again, if we consider the effect of lightning, it is probable that he that is killed by it hears no noise; but the thunderclap which follows, and which most alarms the ignorant, is the surest proof of their safety. --C.C. Colton (17801832) English clergyman and writer. - The skyline was dominated by steeples and the whole town by bells. Everyone knew Christ's 'royal peal' and that New North's had a sour note. King's Chapel's was deep and sad. Old Brattle and Hollis had their bells. Folk would stop in the street to count the 'passing bell' tolling out the sex and age of the deceased. And they always ran to ask for whom the bell tolled. The bells rang wildly for fires or to call out the mob, joyfully for the repeal of certain acts of Parliament or the withdrawal of an especially unpopular royal governor. They tolled over 'tyranny.' They opened and closed the markets, and twice on Sunday called all to church or meeting. These were the great bells the very voice of Boston. Besides there were countless smaller ones. Hand-bells rung on the street advertising 'wonders' and sales, or that it was two o'clock and 'The Bunch of Grapes' was about to serve dinner. Schoolmasters rang for school, cowbells drowsed through the blueberry bushes and hardhack of the Common, and all day long, in hundreds of shops and houses, the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of doorbells. In winter-time came the frosty sparkle of sleighbells as citizens rode out in their 'booby- huts.' The music of bells is almost forgotten by modern ears. Then it was everywhere. --Esther Forbes, _Paul Revere and the World He Lived In_ - The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of cannon, but its echo lasts a great deal longer. --Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (18091894) American physician, poet, and essayist. _The Professor at the Breakfast Table_ [1860] Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams. --Mary Ellen Kelly I never hear parents exclaim impatiently, 'Children, you must not make so much noise,' that I do not think how soon the time may come when those parents would give all the world, could they hear once more the ringing laughter which once so disturbed them. --Abbott E. Kittredge (18341912) English clergyman. Loudness is impotence. --Johann Kaspar Lavater (17411801) Swiss writer, Protestant pastor, and founder of physiognomics. There are braying men in the world, as well as braying asses; for what is loud and senseless talking other than a way of braying? --Sir Roger L'Estrange (16161704) English journalist and pamphleteer. Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent. --Napoleon I (17691821) Emperor of France [18041815]. It is with narrow-souled people as with narrow-necked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out. --Alexander Pope (16881744) English poet. _Miscellanies_ Vol 2 [1727] ^ Jean Jacques Rousseau (17121778) French philosopher and novelist. Rousseau owed a great deal to his patroness, Mme De Vercelles. As she was readying to die, Rousseau waited by her bedside. She could no longer speak, and it was clear death was near. Suddenly, she broke wind loudly. 'Good,' she said, 'a woman who can fart is not dead.' Upon which she died. --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and Andrι Bernard [2000 ed.] ^ Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be particularly painful. --Arthur Schopenhauer (17881860) German philosopher. (Quoted in Holmes _The Poet's Work_.) The saying is true, 'The empty vessel makes the greatest sound.' --William Shakespeare (15641616) English dramatist. _King Henry V_ [15981599], Act 4, Scene 4, line 72 It is not the same to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring. --Spanish Proverb - Thunder is good, thunder is impressive but it is the lightning that does the work. --Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. p. 818 of "Mark Twain's Letters" [1917 ed], Vol. II according to _Mark Twain at your Fingertips_, ed. Caroline Thomas Harnsbarger. Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid. --Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. "Well, there were sixty-eight people there, and sixty-two of them had no more desire to throw a stone than you had." "Satan!" "Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end." --Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (18351910) American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot. _The Mysterious Stranger_ [1916], ch. 9 - I'd hate to be next door to her on her wedding night. --Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov [19212004] British entertainer, writer, and humanitarian. (On tennis player Monica Seles.) ----- borborygm (noun) [bor-bκ-'rig-κm] The gurgling sounds made by the stomach after eating. cacophony [kuh-KAH-fuh-nee], noun: 1. Harsh or discordant sound; dissonance. 2. The use of harsh or discordant sounds in literary composition. Ex. New York was then a cacophony of sounds -- a dozen accents ricocheting off surrounding buildings as immigrant mothers called their children home for supper, noon whistles blowing, vendors hawking their wares on the streets, children shouting, horses whinnying, and people yelling. --Herbert G. Goldman, _Banjo Eyes_ eructation [ih-ruhk-TAY-shuhn], noun: The act of belching; a belch. hullabaloo (noun) [hκ-lκ-bκ-'lu] Ruckus, clamor, fuss, uproar. knell [NEL], verb: The stoke of a bell tolled at a funeral or at the death of a person; a death signal; a passing bell; hence, figuratively, a warning of, or a sound indicating, the passing away of anything. plangent [PLAN-juhnt], adjective: 1. Beating with a loud or deep sound, as, "the plangent wave." 2. Expressing sadness; plaintive. stentorian (adj.) [sten-'to-ri-κn] Extremely loud or having an extremely loud voice. Etymology: The eponym of this commonization is Stentor, the Greek herald in the Trojan War whose voice was as powerful as those of fifty other men according to the Iliad. tintinnabulation [tin-tih-nab-yuh-LAY-shuhn], noun: A tinkling sound, as of a bell or bells. vociferous [voh-SIF-uhr-uhs], adjective: Making a loud outcry; clamorous; noisy. . . see "INDIVIDUALITY" for related links To be nobody but myself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. --E.E. (Edward Estlin) Cummings (18941962) American poet. Letter to a high-school editor [1955], in R. Buckminster Fuller, forward to _Critical Path_ [1981]. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882) American philosopher and poet. _Essays_, First Series [1841], "Self-Reliance" I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. --Robert Frost (18741963) American poet. Closing lines, "The Road Not Taken" The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified, and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. --Josι Ortega y Gasset (18831955) Spanish philosopher. _The Revolt of the Masses_ [1929] The so-called nonconformists travel in groups and woe unto him who doesn't conform. --Eric Hoffer (19021983) American longshoreman, philosopher, and author who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1982. In Jack Flincher, _Docker of Philosophy_, "Life" [24 March 1967]. When we lose the right to be different, we lose the right to be free. --Charles Evans Hughes (18621948) American professor of law, politician, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court [19301941]. Address commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Faneuil Hall, Boston [17 June 1925]. Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away. --Henry David Thoreau (18171862) American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher. _Walden_ [1854], ch. 18 end page | NAME CALLING - NASTINESS | NATIONALISM - NATIVE AMERICANS | NATURE | NAVY - NEGLECT | NEIGHBORS/NEIGHBORHOOD - NEW YORK | NEW YORK CITY | NEWS - NEWSPEAK | NICE - NONCONFORMITY | NIXON YEARS | NONSENSE - NOVEMBER | NUCLEAR WAR - NURSERY RHYMES | OBESITY - OBSTACLES | OBSTINACY - OKLAHOMA | OLD - OLD AGE | OLD-FASHIONED - OPERA | OPINION | OPPORTUNITY - ORGANIZATION | ORIGINALITY - OYSTERS | | H | I - J | K - L | M | N - O | P - Q | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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