Word: joking
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...social sciences as the only valid approach to the problems of our day--an attitude which seems ridiculous to a person who has any remote interest in the antiquity of Greece and Rome. It is a strange thing that seemingly intelligent people consider the Classics as "a dull joke" or "definitely exotic" or commit the old fallacy of expressing the term "dead languages" in a tone of contempt. To postulate as a self evident truth the fact that there is nothing of importance in the doings of man before 1900, is to exhibit a downright ignorance of the past...
What is represented by the term "the Classics" in this University is a dull joke in the minds of too many of its students. Most of them have memorized and forgotten the slight vocabulary necessary to turn a given amount of Cicero into English and thus distinguish themselves by the degree of Artium Baccalaurcus from their unlearned brethren of the S.B. The pursuit of the Classics as a four-year course of study is definitely exotic and the expression "dead languages," uttered in a tone of contempt, illustrates the depths to which this subject has sunk...
...relaxation he loafs in Hyde Park with his bounding black Afghan coursing hounds, Rib and Rab, one a gift from the King of Afghanistan. Their full names, Ribbentrop and Rabinovich, are Augur's private joke in defiance of Nazi anti-Jewish legislation. Trained to run down gazelles, Rib and Rab now lope with their master on his news hunts all over England, have committed nuisances in the sacred precincts of the Foreign Office itself...
Gaunt Old Dr. Francis Everett ("The Plan") Townsend told Detroit's Recorder's Court Judge Edward J. Jeffries a joke: "The President went fishing once and forgot his bait. He looked over the side of the boat, cleared his throat, and said: 'My friends-.' A thousand suckers stuck their heads out of the water...
...powerful dynamo generating nothing," her crotchets finally became almost surrealistic. She bought a hideous house at Brighton, spent $250,000 to remodel it into something worse. Her gardens were planted with tin and china flowers. She built a staircase of imitation books with joke titles, was delighted to see visitors try to pocket a half crown painted on her doorstep. For house wear her favorite garb was a cheap flannel nightgown, fastened by an emerald and diamond brooch, from which hung a sixpenny police whistle. She had more lawsuits than she could count and called her house Writs Hotel. Half...