Saul Bellow and Dorothy Sayers both have birthdays in June (Bellow would have turned ninety). By odd coincidence, they are also both quoted at the same entry in Webster's Third—gink. Never heard of gink? Don't feel bad; neither had we. See these quotes and others from Bellow and Sayers.
Gink means “a person,” “a guy,” “a fellow,” and its origin is unknown. Here’s how Bellow and Sayers used the word:
“… a calm, responsible-looking gink”—Saul Bellow
“… deceased was a dashed unpleasant old gink”—Dorothy Sayers
And here’s a short selection of other words that are nicely exemplified by the birthday honorees. To make the quotations a little more interesting, we’ve restored some of the context that is edited out in the entries in Webster’s Third.
From Saul Bellow:
bat verb
“Sometimes I almost convinced myself that I was ready to bat around the mountains with the snake nooses and cameras and guns.”
brute adjective
“As we left the harbor, the North Atlantic, brute gray, heckled the ship with its strength …”
quench noun
“Then the MacManus went down. The sudden quench of the white light was how I knew it.”
soiree
“… attending Mrs. Renling’s bridge or mah-jongg soirees in her silk, penthouse parlor.”
stun noun
“There were bucklings and crashes and then the inside stun of an explosion.”
swank verb
“… he swanked around, still healthy of flesh, in white suits.”
whiff noun
“The eagle … mounted her arm with that almost inaudible whiff of his spread wings that’s so fearful in itself …”
And from Dorothy Sayers:
celerity
“… disposing of the parsnip wine with a celerity which might have been due to eagerness but, to Harriett, rather suggested a reluctance to let the draught linger on the palate.”
cozy adjective
“Wimsey gratefully took in the cozy sitting room, with its little tables crowded with ornaments, its fire roaring behind a chaste canopy of velvet overmantel…”
frivol verb
“… a man of weight and experience . . . does not come and frivol in the typists' room.”
precipitation
“… he had acted with some precipitation and had probably started out upon a wild-goose chase.”
pukka
“of a genuine or total nature; absolutely first class”
“The case is pukka, all right. Probably a gift from some wealthy female admirer.”
tootle verb
“I think I'll tootle off to bed.”
twister
“a shifty, tricky, or unprincipled person”
“He's a twister, but I'll be able to make him see that it'll pay him to be straight with me.”
widdershins
“in a left-handed or contrary direction; counterclockwise”
“He turned to his right, knowing that it is unlucky to walk about a church widdershins.”
