Word: jerk
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...rough translation-bawls the ten-year-old heroine of Zazie dans le Métro, a new French film currently packing Paris cinema houses. While her contemporaries practiced the piano, Zazie practiced les belles four-lettres. She learned her French history ("Napoleon! That jerk gives me a pain, with his bowlegs and his corny hat"), dreamed of a career as a schoolmarm ("so I can beat the stuff out of the brats"), until she heard that teachers would soon be replaced by machines, and decided instead to be an astronaut ("so I can beat the stuff out of the Martians...
...spittoon, even worse than a spittoon-a cuspidor"; Nationalist China was "a corpse we have to cast right out of here, straight to hell." From places and things he descended to personalities: Syngman Rhee was "a throttler and choker of the Korean people," Philippine Delegate Lorenzo Sumulong "a jerk and a lackey," Dag Hammarskjold "a fool" and President Dwight Eisenhower "a liar." As for the United Nations itself, "the U.N. is the U.S., it's all one; after all, it's a branch of the State Department...
...William O. Douglas Jr., 28, son of the Supreme Court Justice. Patterning his antics after France's celebrated Mime Marcel Marceau, young Bill was better than boring, less than soaring. His best act was titled "The Five Thousand Pound Lift," in which he applied a superhuman clean-and-jerk to a gigantic invisible object...
schmendrick (Yiddish)-a clumsy jerk...
...theory that it is better to be thrown clear of a flipping car than pinned beneath it, the drivers wear no safety belts, rely on heavy leather jackets for protection. Brakes are sometimes rudimentary; the steering is so sensitive that the slightest nudge of the wheel is enough to jerk the nose around. Most important, a 125-lb., 18-h.p. go kart can match a red-hot Porsche "Spyder" in weight-to-horsepower ratio, and is just as likely to spin out on high-speed curves. After turning two laps in a go kart, Sam Hanks, winner...