Ireland, which enriched the English language with the word boycott,* has invented a refinement of the term. The new word: fethardism, meaning to practice boycott along religious lines.When, eight years ago, Sean Michael Cloney, 22, a Roman Catholic farmer, married Sheila Kelly, 22, Protestant, in London, she made the usual agreement imposed by the Catholic Church on mixed marriages: the children would be brought up as Catholics. Sean brought Sheila back to his big brown farmhouse called Dungulph Castle, a 600-year-old rebuilt Norman mansion in the southern ...

For a day last week Rafael Merry del Val stepped reluctantly out of the shadow of the retirement in which he has lived since the death of Pope Pius X, his beloved friend. He celebrated the silver jubilee of his elevation, at the hands of Pius X, to the cardinalate. He celebrated a high mass. He attended a banquet in his honor. Then once again he withdrew into the cloister of his memories.It was a political tangle which precipitated Merry del Val on his so-glittering early ...

It was the final act in what Britain's Daily Mail newspaper called "one of the biggest acts of civil disobedience in modern times." Chafing under a court order that banned the press from naming a top player with an English soccer club who was alleged to have had an affair with a reality TV star, Britons took to Twitter. By May 21, details of the affair had been leaked so widely on the internet that over 50,000 ...

On Saturday, May 14, as the final whistle ended a 1-1 draw in the English Premier League between Blackburn Rovers and Manchester United, a man looking perhaps a shade younger than his 69 years began dancing around and hugging everyone in sight. If Sir Alex Ferguson, United's manager, looked like a bit of a dork — as he usually does when celebrating — nobody cared. United had just won its 19th English League title, beating the record of its archrival ...

The greatest battle of World War II may still be fought on English soil. If it is, one of many reasons that Hitler may be beaten will be the new and growing British People's Army opposing him: Brit ain's Home Guard. And one of the many obscure heroes responsible for Hitler's defeat will be the most urgent of Britain's advocates for a People's Army: Thomas H. Wintringham. Tom Wintringham is no Sandhurst diehard, but his dope on warfare is from ...

Thomas Hardy lived to be 200 years old, or so it must have seemed to his literary competitors. He reached prominence in 1872 with his second novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, and was going strong half a century later. His last / book, a volume of poems titled Winter Words, appeared in 1928, shortly after his death at 87. In his introduction to Winter Words, Hardy crowed that he was the "only English poet who has brought out a new ...

The wrong people, the wrong drugs have taken over. English majors , fraternity boys and the down-and-outers who would have been bums anywhere are joining the culture. The aggressive psychotic drunk has sprung up now in the drug culture. Heroin and speed have replaced marijuana and LSD. Hippie violence against hippie has become commonplace. It is numbers: too many hippies. We can only afford so many people alienated from society. These are the words of Charlie Whitman, hippie lawyer from ...

In Manhattan a first-grader greets her visiting grandparents, happily exclaiming, "Come here, sientate!" Her bemused grandfather, who does not speak Spanish, nevertheless knows she is asking him to sit down. A Miami personnel officer understands what a job applicant means when he says, "Quiero un part time." Nor do drivers miss a beat reading a billboard alongside a Los Angeles street advertising CERVEZA -- SIX-PACK! This free-form blend of Spanish and English, known as Spanglish, is common linguistic currency wherever ...

In February, the English cricket team — virtual demigods in their country after defeating Australia last summer — were attending a reception amid the Rembrandts and Rubenses in the Picture Gallery of Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth had just pinned medals on the athletes' chests signifying their new status as Members of the Order of the British Empire, and was strolling among them, chatting and laughing with their proud families. She was the star of the show, making ...

MORE THAN 60 YEARS ago, a Polish Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin fled Nazi-occupied Europe, arrived in the U.S. and invented a word that he thought would change the world. Lemkin believed that genocide-- from the Greek geno and the Latin cide --would carry such stigma that states would be loath to commit the crime--or to allow it. Lemkin, a haunted refugee and relentless lobbyist, managed to construct a lasting norm, as Webster's and the Oxford English Dictionary granted ...