purlieus

“Despite having attended both Georgetown and Harvard, where she took a law degree, she remains quick-witted, forthright and occupies a cant-free zone that suffuses the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room with a spirit of patriotic candor that is as welcome as it is rare in the self-involved purlieus of the so-called mainstream media,” Mr. Kimball said.

Inside the Beltway humbly consults the Merriam Webster dictionary to reveal that “purlieus” — the plural form of the noun “purlieu” — means “hangout” or “stomping ground.”

“Way out here one gets that wicked city idea about New York & all those purlieus,” he writes to the dancer Nelson Barclift, from his cottage in Williamstown.

When Ogden Loring had cast burning eyes over the students before him, shook his head sadly and said, “It is a pity. An absolute pity that some of you have not read at least ten thousand books. Then, perhaps, we could begin to have a conversation,” Ben felt himself wanting more than anything in the world to sit before Ogden Loring, ten thousand books glowing in his memory like rubies, and carry on a conversation that had no boundaries, no arbitrary purlieus.

In more sensible purlieus, it might just be that pressure on Senate Republicans, who can see polling sliding against Trump and their party, pays off with actual progress.