Amis's solitary instance of lexical self-denial

From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/27/99
Time: 5:09:38 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.118

Comments

FROM CHARLES MICHENER'S *ESQUIRE* PROFILE:

"Let me show you something from a new short story." He disappears and returns with a sheet of manuscript. The paragraph reads:

"The world looks worse every day...Look at the modern infamies, the twentieth-century sins. Some are strange, some banal, but they all offend the eye, covered in their newborn vernix..."

"Hmmmm. What's a vernix?"

"A kind of coating of gook babies have when they're born. Good word, isn't it?"

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FROM *THE INFORMATION*: "He felt he was pleading---with whom? With the Labrador's puppies, blind, burrowing, and wet with their newborn varnish."