Word: cock
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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More than a snook was cocked at the British Navy last week when the German Navy officially admitted for the first time that it is secretly building a warship of the largest size, the Ersatz Hannover of 35,000 tons. This will be the Fatherland's first fullsize capital ship since the Great War. Two days after the Ersatz Hannover was officially announced, Berlin's semi-official military weekly sprang the further revelation that yet another 35,000-tonner will be rushed to completion to help cock the German national snook...
...inside belt. About a foot farther on, a lever is pressed down, completing an electrical circuit. Some 1,000 to 1,500 volts, depending on the size of the fowl, stepped up by transformers from ordinary house current, pass through the victim, shooting out its tail like an angry cock's, stunning it instantly. The fowl passes on to a revolving circular knife which slits its throat, then through a hot bath to the pluckers...
...Stuart Chase, far behind the times, does not report that the last of this species was given up for dead in 1932. Three survivors remained on Martha's Vineyard until 1928, dwindled to a ten-year-old heath cock that regularly appeared at its traditional courting field, ''boomed" and cockled in a forlorn effort to attract a mate. Efforts to mate it with the prairie chicken proving unsuccessful, the lonely fowl abandoned its solitary courtship in the spring of 1930, was seen for the last time in March...
Meanwhile Fleet Street editors scoffed at the cock & bull yarn some reporters had telephoned in. They said they had talked to an Irishman who said he had talked to a woman who said her little boy had been rescued from drowning in the duck pond of St. James's Park by a tall man in top hat and impeccable morning clothes who looked exactly like the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This Irish yarn seemed all the more unlikely because several men were said to have been standing nearby when the child fell in, while the top-hatted rescuer...
...helpless as the Bank is today, the country will be better off without change if the Bank is only "reformed" to the extent of making it a political shuttle-cock. The strike and M. Blum's program have far-reaching effects in other than the national sphere, for France is essential to the delicate balance of European peace. Let there be one misstep--in connection with the Bank of France or elsewhere--then the whole foundation of European polity and security will crumble away...