Word: highwaymen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Here, There and Everywhere, a volume of essays on slang and cant, Author Partridge subscribes to the theory that English cant had its first big bloom in the Reformation, when dispossessed English priests joined up with thieves and highwaymen and taught them scraps of Latin. By 1630, "Thieves' Latin" had all but passed away, to be replaced by the cant which fathered U.S. gangster and hobo language-a rich mulligan of native ingredients peppered lightly with foreign words, e.g., booze from the Middle Dutch bus en (to tipple), stir from the gypsy stariben (a prison...
...Highwaymen, whose offense made them liable to gibbeting, were the heroes of low life throughout the period. Swift immortalized one such "knight of the pad" in his ballad, Clever Tom Clinch Going to Be Hanged...
...Near Mojave, Calif., highwaymen successfully held up the same mail stage at the same spot for the second time in a month...
...Winston Churchill to grousing about the black market, whose thousands of outlawed operators have made huge fortunes by trading scarce and rationed goods. Said the liberal London Star: "There has never been anything quite like it in this country-certainly not since the 18th-Century organization of thieves and highwaymen...
...Coldfields, and their slaves, overseers and illegitimate children, make up much of Jefferson's past and present population. The stories are full of action and there are few of the involved Proustian passages that made Absalom, Absalom! almost unreadable. Instead, its outdoor scenes of fights with Yankees and highwaymen, its pictures of the transformation of well-bred Southern boys to horse thieves and killers, gives The Unvanquished something of the air of Two Little Confederates as it might be rewritten by an author aware of the race problem, economics and Freudian psychology...