Word: bywords
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...time the bouncy, bumpy Roedean Girl became a national byword, as British as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and the butt of music-hall skits. She wore a bright-colored, shapeless wool Mother Hubbard called a djibbah,* talked in a full-voiced, fruity accent. The Roedean Girl knew how to play cricket and to "play the game"; she never "let the side down," never "sneaked," always "pulled her weight." In caricature and often in fact, she was a mannish, muscular, back-slapping bluestocking...
...Indiana U., then a hotbed of hot music, and promptly began flying about with a flock of undergraduate musicians known as the "Bent Eagles." Their diversions: "Sensuously . . . stroking lemon meringue pie," "muggling" (smoking marijuana) and writing such deathless lines as: "One by one a cow goes by." Their byword: "There are other things in the world besides hot music. I forget what they are, at the moment, but they are around...
...Beat Yale" the Byword...
...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...