Word: gins
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...dressing room just big enough to hold her, a short, stout and bespectacled Negro woman stepped onto the two-by-four stage. The prim expression on her flat face was that of a Sunday school teacher lost in a gin mill and primed to bawl out the customers. Seconds later, her ample hips bouncing, her abdomen lewdly rolling, she was shouting the blues at the top of her voice. Last week, after a 17-year absence, Bertha ("Chippie") Hill was back at her old trade. To Manhattan's smoke-filled Village Vanguard, deep in a Greenwich Village cellar...
Footpads, pickpockets and housebreakers, with all the riffraff who lived by their wits, filled the underworld of London's alleys and gin shops with an argot of which traces still survive. "Frisking" meant searching, then as now. A watch was a "tick," a handkerchief was a "wipe," and "wipe priggers" (pickpockets) flourished among theater standees. A glass of gin was a "flash of lightning',, and too many flashes often lit the way to "Tuck 'em Fair" (the place of execution...
Soon everybody was drinking the "intimatist cocktail"-a gin base with an equal dash of curaçao and of an apéritif. Then Sébille rose and spoke. He spoke of his philosophy and the manner in which life should be lived and rosebuds gathered. The intimatists wrapped themselves in bed sheets to resemble Roman togas. From then until well past dawn, intimatism became general...
...said, "on a matter pertaining to the . . . happiness of certain people who serve us faithfully and well-our chauffeurs. [They are] cooped up in a room without air, without airconditioning, without water and without reading matter. Now they are not even allowed to have a five-cent game of gin rummy in their spare time [because of a ban against gambling...
Suspended from the ceiling of the basilica, high above the Archbishop's head, were the red hats of his four immediate predecessors as archbishop of Quebec, the late Cardinals Taschereau, Bégin, Rouleau and Villeneuve. Quebeckers felt sure that some day soon their new archbishop would receive the red hat himself...