Word: jerk
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...move toward a closer personal touch with Jesus went to the "sinners' bench.'' Behind him the congregation's feet stomped, hands clapped, voices cried, ''Glory, glory, glory, glory." Praying as he became the focus of mass hysteria, the man began to quiver, shake, jerk in a St. Vitus' dance. "Let him get through, oh Lord! More power, Lord! Glory! Glory!" the congregation cried. The man's arms went up. His head went back. His mouth uttered "unknown tongues" until he dropped unconscious, "slain of the Lord'' to rise later "baptized...
...lanyard, a plump, bald little man stood in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden one night last week, out of sight of the audience but within range of a large orchestra whose members were blowing and fiddling for dear life. Suddenly the orchestra leader raised his hand with a jerk. The bald man shut his eyes, pulled the lanyard. Boom went a 17-in. cannon. Boom, Boom, Boom it went again, each time almost knocking the little cannoneer off his feet. Sixteen rifles in the hands of 16 U. S. Coast Guardsmen and infantry fired a volley of 16 blank...
...Young. What relevance this disclosure had to the problem of U. S. neutrality was not explained. But its effect was to jerk the Senate investigators roughly back to the present, make their probings a red-hot Senatorial issue. Abruptly revealed was the sharp cleavage between elder statesmen who had known War politics at first hand and younger men who had looked on from the outside. Hitherto the elders had kept silent while the youthful crusaders monopolized front pages with a revision of U. S. history which made those elders out to have been deplorable bunglers, duped by propaganda or impelled...
...servitude for years on end, a British tar's lot was not a happy one. "To be flogged was to be tortured. The first stroke laid on by a brawny boatswain's mate, as hard as he could at the full length of his arm, would always jerk an involuntary 'Ugh!' out of even the most hardened unfortunate 'seized up to' the grating at the gangway; six blows tore the flesh horribly, while after a dozen the back looked like 'so much putrefied liver.' After a time the bones showed through, blood...
...Muriel Rukeyser was born in New York, attended Vassar, Columbia and the Roosevelt School of the Air, where she gathered material for the title poem in Theory of Flight. In his preface. Stephen Vincent Benet describes her as essentially an urban poet, her mind "fed on the quick jerk of the newsreel, the hard lights in the sky, the long deserted night-street, the take-off of the plane from the ground." The book contains 15 ''Poems Out of Childhood," the long "Theory of Flight," 14 short pieces that range from glimpses of a cinema and a burlesque...