Word: hocked
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Pawnbrokers find the goods that cross their counters a reflection of the times. In 1932 business was rotten: the U.S. had run out of things to hock. Now pawnshops-like the nation-are on a queer, priority-ridden, psychologically insecure spree. Despite typewriter freezing (which has stopped loans on a pawnshop specialty), despite the fact that no workman today would think of hocking his irreplaceable micrometers, calipers and toolbox, most U.S. pawnshops are in the money...
...Skittish civilians are sweeping hock-shop shelves clean of shotguns, rifles, pistols, revolvers...
...Determined air-raid wardens and plane spotters are buying binoculars (except those which meet Navy specifications) and telescopes. In Washington (where pawnshops are illegal but "secondhand merchandise establishments" carry on just the same) antiques, glasses and brassbound telescopes that had been in hock for decades are being snapped up by a rush of buyers...
...Beautiful Bums. Then he moved in on Brooklyn, whose seventh-place Dodgers were in hock to the Brooklyn Trust Co., creditor for half a million dollars. MacPhail-who is never better than when talking hardheaded characters out of important sums-actually sweet-talked the Brooklyn Trust Co. into putting up $300,000 more and giving him full authority to spend it. He brought Red Barber on from Cincinnati; he put on all the stunts he had learned in Columbus and Cincinnati and added a superb new one which became the greatest drawing card in baseball history: he got every team...
...knottiest problems that had ever plagued a bequest-hungry U.S. art museum. He asked Congress for $195,000 so that Washington's palatial new National Gallery could get its latest rich bequest-that of Philadelphia's late Peter Arrell Brown Widener-out of hock. The money was owed for a Pennsylvania gift tax which the Widener will laid on the beneficiary...