Word: grips
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...through that line of bigots into the high school. "That's easy to say if you are not involved," said Sahl, fingering the trigger. "But if you are in the Administration, you have a lot of problems of policy, like whether or not to use an overlapping grip." Wild laughter always greeted that one, but with a nod and a nervous chuckle, and a characteristic "It s true, it's true," he would slide off into a skein of digressions, usually with an aside for interested conservatives, telling them that they could get the Chicago Tribune anywhere...
Psycho. Hitchcock's hand may be heavier than usual and totally immersed in blood, but it can still grip the spectator by the throat more expertly than the claws of any horror artist in the business...
...Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson seems to belong to a different generation and a different world. He still has an in eradicable touch of Texas backlands about him. When he is trying to persuade or cajole somebody, as he often is, he grabs an arm or shoulder in a bruising grip, and a hint of the carnival snake-oil seller shows in his voice. His fellow Senators joke about the lavish vanity of his tailoring and his baronial Senate office?but they respect him, too. Last June the non-partisan Congressional Quarterly polled Senators and Representatives on who they thought would...
...pagan past. Old Maniots are convinced that Nereids haunt the local fountains, and mothers believe that the three Fates hover over an infant's cradle to write invisible destinies on the child's brow (moles are known as "writings of the Fates"). Seafarers claim that Gorgons grip their caiques in a storm and ask in ringing tones, "Where is Alexander the Great?" If the captain shouts, "Alexander the Great lives and reigns!", the sea turns calm. Otherwise, the Gorgon tilts the boat toward sea bottom, and all hands drown...
Webster is a moldy fig. For all its scholarship, the supposedly unabridged dictionary (600,000 entries) gives hardly a hint that the American language is in the grip of a permanent revolution. The Websterian ideal of language as a careful garden of hardy perennials and occasional exotics, cultivated by a corps of devoted lexicographers, is consistently challenged by a weedy invasion of the vulgate. Professors may still protest, but the public -and most authorities-tends to silence them. Says one philologist: "It was once thought that most slang came from the underworld, but nowadays a great deal of it comes...