Word: kowtow
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...nation's top war commanders. When Generals MacArthur and Marshall return to pick up the two additional degrees promised them in their absence, Mr. Sargent's disgust will probably be complete. It has a right to be. Not only did the University go out of its way to kowtow to the brass, but its entire handling of the honorary degree situation served, not to enhance Harvard's prestige, but rather to bring it down to the sorry level of other similar institutions scrambling for a ray of reflected glory...
...American Farmer. The Hazlitts were enchanted with its lyrical mixture of democracy and agriculture. Father Hazlitt, a struggling Unitarian minister, decided to emigrate. Soon Parson Hazlitt established Boston's first Unitarian church. But ill-health and parish problems (he would rather "die in a ditch," he said, than kowtow to his congregation) drove Parson Hazlitt back to Britain. Wrote the future author of Winterslow, then aged eight: "I shall never forget that we came to America. ... I think for my part that it would have been a great deal better if the white people had not found...
...Ranee of Sarawak, en route to London from Borneo, sounded off to Manhattan reporters on titled visitors, declared: "They're making enemies. . . . What have we got to be snobbish about? The English aristocracy is down and out. . . . Your moneyed crowd kowtow to anybody with a handle to his name. These smarties don't like me. They like my title...
...equally disastrous for strategic reasons. This is a key step in the Battle of the Mediterranean. With the army of the Nile defeated Egypt would soon be lost. Turkey would find the Germans knocking at her back door and, in the absence of the British, would have to kowtow to their proposals. The loss of Turkey would force the British to choose the more direct overland road to Russia in order to establish a common front. This might well be impossible...
...self-educated fellow-Swinburne was his favorite poet; Nietzsche was his god-Ed's flood of talk was mostly a lurid rehash of his reading. Ellen was too ignorant even to understand much of it, but it fascinated her. Ed was a good salesman, but he hated to kowtow to people, tossed up one job after another. He liked to stay away from home, living in hotels and boardinghouses...