Word: bum
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...left his money, and directions to master the ceremonies. Announced Dr. Reitman: "Everybody eat, drink, and be merry-that's what Harry ordered. Harry was a sponger . . . and no good, but he had a fine heart." Services opened with the singing of "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum." Vagrants got drunk, made speeches, piously intoned the Hobo's Prayer. At wake's end, quarters were distributed to every guest. Next day Host Harry Batter was cremated, and his ashes scattered over the graves of the Haymarket rioters...
...press conference that it was his 15Oth since he entered the White House. "I congratulate you on your endurance," remarked the President. The correspondents chorused: "Same to you, Sir!" But the President was not in a humorous mood. He taxed the reporters for giving the country a "bum steer." The reporters countered by asking if Mr. Roosevelt now had anything specific to say about his future money policies. Impatiently the President told them: "I am neither a prestidigitator nor an astrologer." Forthwith he denied that he and Senator Bulkley had talked about anything except Ohio politics. Any impression that...
...presence on earth." In his own person or in thin disguise he writes about barber shops, bawdy houses, cold rooms in Manhattan or San Francisco, pawning his typewriter, finding a little brown snake in a park, being kept after school because he had laughed at the teacher, a bum who was still too dignified to sell dirty postcards. At times he seems as inept an introspective fumbler as Sherwood Anderson at his silliest, but at others he gets nearer the gist of the matter than Anderson at his most inspired. Though Saroyan has a contempt for cleverness, literariness, his searching...
...those round-table experts "lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down"; of complacent citizens of "England, this country of ours where nobody is well"; of such tycoons as newspaper-owning Lord Rothermere-Beethameer, Beethameer, bully of Britain, With your face as fat as a farmer's bum...
...good old anatomical word in England, "bum" in U. S. parlance means a down-&-outer. But not every social outcast answers willingly to the name. Many a hobo is no bum but a journeyman worker, traveling cheaply from one seasonal occupation to another. Some "jungle" inhabitants are college graduates, may even be sociologists in search of statistics. Such a bloodhound in bum's clothing was Author Thomas Minehan. Disguising himself with apparently complete success, he spent two years' vacations traveling in boxcars, weekending in jungles, standing in mission breadlines, indefatigably taking notes. The result was the first book...