Word: handmaiden
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Fetch Me My Handmaiden. Far from being proud of his business connections, said Veblen, the tycoon does his best to convince people that he has never handled a deal in his life. He buys an impractical top hat, to symbolize his state of "conspicuous leisure." He goes off on a jag of "conspicuous consumption"-i.e., he pours his machine-made money into old china and silverware whose chief virtue is that they are handmade and therefore obviously very expensive. To show that he can afford to be "conspicuously wasteful," he turns a stretch of productive pasture into a non-productive...
...Venus' handmaiden, she has one mighty asset besides well-publicized vitality: a native shrewdness at hiring smart people to work for her. Says she: "I only want people around me who can do the impossible." She rarely hires anyone who is out of a job. She tolerates no tomfoolery or inefficiency in horse trainers or jockeys either. She bubbles into the paddock before a race to tell her jockeys to "get out in front and go, go, go!" When she loses, she is apt to blame anyone but the horse...
...past, haunted by Silverman's wise-guy gentleness, his scoops, his Hispano-Suizas. Variety labors to be in the know about the future of television and 16-mm.-film theaters, so that if radio or the movies go the way of vaudeville, it will still be the journalistic handmaiden of entertainment...
...little men & women of Athens, round whose homes the battle swirled, went mostly hungry. Inside their area the British were feeding tinned meat every day to some 75,000 people, or one in 25 of the city's population. Less fortunate Athenians subsisted on herbs and grasses. Disease, handmaiden of hunger, had not yet appeared, but ELAS and British doctors, under Red Cross protection, thought it best to confer on epidemic control...
...Japanese consider that the main function of the Navy, besides defending the home islands, is to pave and patrol safe sea roads to the Empire's outposts. In the realm of strategy the Japanese Navy is the Army's handmaiden. The Navy commits its ships for the most part in direct support of land operations and supply lines...