Word: byword
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...even asked to lighten the load of parents beset with the one-track vagaries of small boydom. Wrote one of them to us recently, in some desperation: "I have a ten-year-old son who (collects) military insignia. . . . For the past six months our name has been a byword in Downers Grove (Ill.). People start suddenly and streak for home when they see any of us approaching. No one is safe from our friendly, but firm, tug on the sleeve and an insinuating voice saying, 'That's a nice patch you're wearing; have you a spare...
...vane of the windmill, pulls off his overshoes and sets them neatly in a little casement near the back steps, washes (after pumping water in a basin at the kitchen sink), and sits down at the kitchen table to one of his wife's suppers-a county byword for good cooking...
...morning Gopal Singh went out on the veranda of his house near the Himalayan foothills and handed his wife, Pyari, some women's dresses to hem. Said Pyari: "Isn't it enough that you should make your house a byword . . . must [you] bring your whore's clothes here? . . . Take back your filth!" Gopal Singh slapped her face. Screamed Pyari: "Why don't you shoot me? . . ." Half an hour later, Pyari was dead. Said Gopal's father: "We must say she died of cholera." Said Gopal: "She must be burned at once. ... It must...
When swindler Clarence Charles Hatry was sentenced to 14 years in jail (two of them at hard labor), he lamented: "My name has become a byword, and I am irretrievably ruined...
That was in 1930, at the bar of London's Old Bailey. Hatry's name was indeed a byword-for financial juggling at its most spectacular. When all his Indian clubs clatter-banged down together in 1929, investors lost $145,000,000. Hatry's crash shook shaky Wall Street. But last week Clarence Hatry, out of jail, was far from irretrievably ruined. From the look of things he was building up another fortune-his third...