June 2009

Notable and Quotable: John Hersey

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Hersey was born June 17 1914, days before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand precipitated the First World War. Hersey grew up to write Hiroshima, an account of the aftermath of the atomic bomb that is considered one of the finest pieces of twentieth-century journalism. He was also a novelist. His words also appear at 31 entries in the Unabridged dictionary — and here's a dozen colorful examples.

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arriviste noun
"an impoverished family of high breeding and training sneers self-consolingly at vulgar arrivistes"

depressed adjective
"the depressed populations of the ghettos of the Middle East and North Africa"

hard core noun
"hard-core cases -- incurably sick people, bedridden old people, inevitable charges of the state"

hyperbolist noun
"humorists and hyperbolists"

Jonah noun
"her left foot was her Jonah; nothing had ever happened to her right foot"

judas noun
"peering through the broken judas in the door of the cell"

kibbutz noun
"the kibbutz is one of four main types of agricultural settlement"

meatball noun
"it was too bad the army had sent such a meatball to be administrator"

qualmish adjective
"qualmish . . . he refused to kill a spider"

skylark noun
"full of gusto, and to him everything is a skylark"

vee noun
"the vast, gloomy vee of the gorge"

waltz verb
"don't like strangers waltzing around up here"


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