Word: canting
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...unusual phenomenon: a group of roaming laborers who spend half the year painting houses around the country and then return in winter to a self-contained, anachronistic universe. The Travelers arrange their children's marriages and, in front of "country people" (non-Travelers), speak a Gaelic-English dialect called "cant." ("Misli shayjo!" means "Go away, the police are here!") Some have traces of Irish accents, though their ancestors arrived in the U.S. 150 years ago. Says Michael McDonagh, one of the 30,000 Travelers still in Ireland, who has worked with hisU.S. counterparts: "Their sense of tradition is stronger there...
...Traveler settlement near Fort Worth, Texas, where Toogood has lived, local non-Travelers say prepubescent boys carry wads of cash and drive their parents' flashy new cars. Some Travelers are indeed yonks, the cant term for thieves. Six North Augusta Travelers pleaded guilty last year to using fraudulent documents to buy cars. Toogood's husband John is facing trial in Montana for allegedly duping elderly residents with faulty home-repair work...
...were assignments for magazines and newspapers. They sent him to India to reminisce, to the Caribbean to cover political discontent or crime stories, to America to write about the Republican Convention of 1984, to Africa, South America, and elsewhere. What Naipaul brought to every assignment was his distrust of cant and his own strong opinions...
...stay in school, because they are properly grateful to have the chance to study here. Yet this student has chosen to leave Harvard practically as soon as he arrived, which says only that he was never serious about education to begin with. Maybe it is a refreshing absence of cant not to pay lip service to education, but this seems to me to be the least Harvard should expect from its applicants, even athletes recruited to play sports. In the meantime we have Jesse E. Lane’s brief achievements on the ice to salute: three games, one assist...
...band. I think a lot of the stuff we play is due to the shared experience there in the wee hours of the night. There is this spontaneous thing that other guests can think is rude, but well sometimes all just stop. Our eyes all glaze over, and we cant continue our conversations because an amazing thing just went on in the music...