The portrait drawn of Ariel Durant in Michael Korda's "Another Life" must be revisited by all lovers of a good belly laugh. She is another Manichean narcissist, tiny, fierce, paranoid rather like Ayn Rand (shudder!). "Her voice was low and guttural and her expression that of Madame Defarge and her tricoteuses friends demanding the guillotine for an aristocrat." Such women are more frightening than any man ..... and one has seen many replicas of Ariel and Ayn as bosses over the years.

The gruesome, undemocratic word "boss" derives from the Dutch "baas" meaning master; Roget's synonyms for employee include lackey, slave, hireling.