Word: cocking
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...Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (by Sean O'Casey) waited nine years to reach New York, and then turned up off Broadway. Written long after O'Casey's lusty, naturalistic prime, it is streaked with fantasy and symbolism. Its man-sized crowing cock is everything that Ireland, for O'Casey, is not-life-loving, joyous, free. Against his feathered friend O'Casey sets all his inveterate foes-ignorant old windbags, bullying priests, superstition-clogged rustics, tightfisted employers. Above all, a tyrannic Puritanism blasts the temptations of the flesh, makes war on warmblooded temptresses...
With its scarifyingly freakish weather, eerie sounds and collapsing houses, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy becomes at times a farcical free-for-all, as at other times it blares a propagandist freedom-for-no-one. Much of the writing, whether wrathful, lyrical or lowdown, has the true O'Casey tang. And despite symbols that are more like stencils and incidents too much like one another, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy has its amusing scenes and its fiery ones. Unhappily, in a quite un-Gaelic and ponderous production, there emerges nothing of the robustly comic playwright; the horseplay is elephantine, the darts...
...went to Europe in my junior and senior year. I went over in the summer and concocted a cock-and-bull story about wanting to be in the diplomatic service .... I wasn't in the diplomatic corps. The ambassador let me be in the embassy. Just t' see if I liked...
...heavy grace of a Wagnerian diva. Last week a trim, svelte (25 Ibs. lighter) Juliana delivered another royal oration, and the London Sunday Dispatch gleefully revealed what it claimed to be the slimming secret: a bland diet ordered by a fat, fiftyish hair-restorer salesman named Jos de Cock, who runs the "Enorga Institute" in The Hague. After an analysis of strips of litmus paper that a prospective weight loser licks after meals, went the story, De Cock devises a special diet for a low-calorie fee (sample: $37 for eight weeks' advice, plus $17 for the diet lists...
...specialists in constitutional law, the nationalists-will cavil at Churchill's large-minded judgments. Yet this same generosity of spirit enables him to write of the American Civil War as the noblest war-one fought on sheer principle. Even Civil War buffs who know the last cock plume in the "shapos" at Bull Run will be moved by Churchill's brief epilogue to Gettysburg: "When that morning came, Lee, after a cruel night march, was safe on the other side of the river. He carried with him his wounded and his prisoners. He had lost only five guns...