Word: brisking
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...House of Commons last week brisk Brigadier Ralph Rayner, a Tory, made an eloquent plea to Food Minister John Strachey. All that he asked on behalf of his constituents in the tiny Devonshire village of Kingsteignton was one ram. Each spring for many centuries (no one knew exactly when it began) the villagers celebrated a legendary pagan rite: they thanked the gods for their spring water by sacrificing a ram. Then they drank and danced, roasted the ram and feasted on the mutton. Rayner pleaded: "Is the Minister aware . . . that it is very unlucky to interfere with customs and traditions...
Billy does ridicule, but only halfheartedly, the life he leads. "My only exercise," he once jeered contentedly, "is a brisk walk to the bathroom." Until recently, he dodged the sun: "I should get wrinkled. What am I, a prune?" Every week he puts away handfuls of costly chocolates, most of which have long since settled in a small bulge in the middle of his 5 ft. 3 in., 140-lb. frame. Billy's skin has a worn, beige look, grading to blue under his quick, cold eyes...
Billy's column takes the broad view. One day he may deliver a cheap-seats catcall at international politicos; the next he may tool up an ancient vaudeville wheeze into a brisk short short. A sample of his grandest manner: "Even if we told them how, I don't think the Russians could make the atom bomb. . . . I gather it takes more than a cyclotron, some chemists, and a boy to run out for coffee. I don't think the Soviets have what it takes. . . . How come they haven't been able to turn...
Last week, Pierino walked briskly on to the stage of Paris' Palais de Chaillot, dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroyish black velvet jacket, white lace collar, and short pants. The podium had been built up so nine-year-old Pierino could see all of the 70 musicians of the Association des Concerts Lamoureux. He conducted Schubert's Unfinished without a score, and handled it decisively. He was less certain in Beethoven's Fifth-the brasses got away from him in the finale. But he did well enough to touch off 20 minutes of cheers. Pierino took seven...
...current American Journal of Psychiatry, Dr. Menninger gets right down to cases and gives a brisk lecture-not to society in general-but to his 4,000 psychiatric colleagues. To meet their postwar responsibilities, he implies, they had better pay less attention to rich ladies with imaginary complaints in their heads and jewels on their fingers, and more to the unhappy man in the streets. The war, says ex-Brigadier General Menninger (the Army's chief wartime psychiatrist) brought psychiatry to a crossroads: "We may continue to permit our chief emphasis to be . . . in seeing six or eight analytic...