Word: drawerfuls
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...Peggy, his dog, for her regular 10 a.m. walk. Says he: "The next thing I knew, I was here on the floor. Eight Puerto Ricans piled in and started hitting me with broom handles. They hit poor Peggy on the head with a hammer. They picked through this drawer and found $60 worth of quarters. Then one of them bent over me with a knife, holding it to my throat. 'Shall I kill him now?' he asked another guy. And the other guy said, 'No, the boss doesn't want him hurt...
Newman's previous book on the decline of English, the bestselling Strictly Speaking, seemed to consist largely of dreadfully apt examples Newman had stuffed into a desk drawer over the years. These prompted readers to send him their own favorite examples. A Civil Tongue appears to be written from the mailbag. It offers a plethora of mangled speech and prose, drawn not only from advertisers, politicians, sportcasters and sociologists, but also from people who should know better, such as educators and journalists (among the most cited offenders: the New York Times, TIME* and Newman's employer...
...when the word sculpture meant solidity. But their wit lasted. Time and again, one encounters feats of inspired and self-mocking draftsmanship, traced with wire in air: portraits of Jimmy Durante and the shimmying Josephine Baker, or a farouche she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus through six wooden drawer pulls that serve as her teats. Often there is a prophetic note. Calder's motorized sculptures of the '30s predict the kinetic art of the '60s and are fulfilled in such giant works as Universe (1974), in Chicago's Sears Tower...
...after his great-great-great-great grandfather stumbled off the deck of the slave ship Lord Ligonier at the same spot. His ancestor was Kunta Kinte, one of 98 "Negroes" who managed to survive the three-month trip from West Africa. The original consignment, "packed like spoons in a drawer " included 140 Africans. The one-third loss, Haley notes drily, was about average for an 18th century slave voyage...
Some employers hire part-time workers and pay them "off the books," usually in greenbacks taken from the petty-cash drawer. The employer gets the advantage of cheap labor; the workers draw both clandestine wages and jobless benefits. Harold Kasper, who directs New York State's unemployment insurance program, ran into one such case by sheer accident: while munching a corned beef on rye at an Albany delicatessen, he overheard a waitress complaining to a friend that another waitress was being paid off the books. Such freakish breaks aside, says Kasper, the fraud is extremely hard to combat...