Word: hack
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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They usually did. Although Mencken tore great holes in the fabric of U.S. manners & morals, he almost always let in more air than light. His job, at a time when the job needed doing, was to cudgel Comstockery and hack at hypocrisy, and he did both with a zest that makes his pages effervesce 30 years after their subjects were topical. Mencken, whatever the college boys may have thought a quarter-century ago, was no great thinker; he was a man of stout prejudices, with a gift and vocabulary for iconoclastic expression even richer than Mark Twain...
Both too lurid and too grandiose, The Big Knife writes of lost idealists, in whom there was always something of the ham or the hack, as though they were fallen archangels. It stirs little real sympathy for them. Designed as scathing tragedy, it emerges as botched melodrama which often suggests an ugly farce...
...these dog fanciers are a pretty shifty breed, tall, gaunt folks with an option on half the unborn thoroughbred pups in North America. But the dogs themselves are a pleasant, patient lot who accept graciously some small attention and stand stoically as their masters brush, comb, chalk them, or hack away at their toenails...
...first bid was 15,000 guineas ($51,000). According to legend, a tipsy hack driver, without a quarter in his pocket, kept raising the bidding until it reached $100,000. Actually, 75 seconds after the bidding opened, Australian Industrialist W. J. Smith got the horse for about $88,000. Two months later, Shannon headed for fabled California, where $100,000 purses grow on bushes...
Died. Lewis R. ("Hack") Wilson, 48, colorful, brawling onetime National League home-run king (in 1930 he hit 56, four short of Ruth's record); in Baltimore. An ex-coal miner, Wilson joined the New York Giants in 1923, hit his peak from 1926 to 1931 with the Chicago Cubs, finally drank his way out of the big leagues, ended up broke...