Word: finks
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Copper-Bellied Corpse. The American folk who emerge from this lore are robust, daredevil, imaginative, fond of broad humor, tender love, great deeds, crude, rude, sometimes full of noble sentiment, sometimes intolerant. They glorify outlaws (Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid), poke fun at woodsmen (Mike Fink, Davy Crockett), sanctify Johnny Appleseed. The U.S. gift for tall talk is flaunted in Sven, the Hundred Proof Irish man, and speeches by General Buncombe ("Sir, we want elbow room - the continent, the whole continent - and nothing but the continent"). The U.S. talent for epithet is flaunted...
...chief engineer had been known to unioneers as a fink. Some five months later, District Attorney Earl Warren got three union officials indicted and convicted on a charge of conspiracy to murder the engineer. The trial had some curious aspects: the judge was an old friend of Warren's; the deputy district attorney who tried the case became heavily indebted to one of the jurors. Labor and many liberals cried "frame-up"; labor unions surrounded the courthouse daily with 1,000 pickets. The three unioneers were subsequently pardoned by Governor Culbert Olson. Labor has never completely forgiven Earl Warren...
...Machine parts made of powdered metals. Says Electrochemist Colin Garfield Fink of Columbia University: "The basic idea is simple. Fill any mold with a metal powder. Apply pressure, and increase the temperature to a certain point. ... A hard metal object is promptly produced." Advantages: speed, economy and the opportunity to make parts of a single object out of different metals, molded together...
Mark Twain had once described a legendary Mississippi River roustabout, Mike Fink, as "half man, half alligator," the Vagabond remembered. That certainly caught his character right,--a leathery-hides roughneck, quick with a knife, ready to let you have it with hands, feet, fingernails, anti teeth if he didn't like the way you shook your dice...
...cleaned things up in Washington when he was elected. In Tennessee a fellow who didn't own a big spread of buckshot land and had to scratch along in the pines some-where didn't see things just the same way as a Virginia Whig. So Mike Fink was a Democrat...