Word: harrumph
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...blackouts. At least half the movie is made up of wacky little vaudeville routines, in which a stock Englishman and a stock Frenchman alternate the pratfalls. Major (ret.) William Marmaduke Thompson, C.S.I., D.S.O., O.B.E. (played by Jack Buchanan, the British George M. Cohan), is a cuff-shooting old harrumph who has left his best years East of Suez. Monsieur Taupin (played by Noel-Noel, a comedian who looks like a French edition of the late Robert Benchley) is a middle-aged owl with a skid-mark mustache who leaps at every idea, flailing with all extremities, as though it were...
...waves lapped with a feathery sound on a soft beach, and a bell buoy clanked mournfully. On the other side of the record was a kind of aural shipboard narrative, beginning with the gorgeous sound of the Queen Mary's deep bass whistle, and ending with the horrid harrumph of the West Quoddy Head horn...
Staid Argentines, whose daughters still may not date without chaperones, could hardly be expected to swallow all this without an occasional harrumph. One oppositionist deputy introduced a bill in Congress to forbid public activity by officials' wives. Earlier this month, naval cadets coughed so pointedly during a newsreel of Evita that their Peronist C.O. saw fit to expel over 20 of them. But the Argentine-in-the-street likes...
...this impasse, some insurance thinkers have been looking for a new, constructive answer. One idea that is causing conservatives to harrumph in the insurance board rooms: that an investment pool for new or expanding industries be formed, with insurance companies sup plying the "senior" capital. Effect: a kind of privately owned RFC. Likelihood: little; the insurance business as a whole is doing too well as it is to be receptive to radical new tinkerings...
First, what about absenteeism? "In my opinion. . . ." John Lewis cleared his throat with a significantly explosive harrumph. "In my opinion absenteeism is a question that runs through the human equation. . . . I have been told that absenteeism is higher in Congress than it is in industry." He leaned a little forward and added, with a slight, royal gesture of his labor boss's sceptre, a cigar: "I notice that absenteeism prevails on this committee this morning...