Word: kowtow
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...heaping it with vulgarity and ridicule. When, says Reynolds, mustachioed Czar Peter the Great rebuked a Western ambassador for being effeminately clean-shaven, the envoy pertly retorted: "Had my royal master measured wisdom by the beard, he would have sent a goat." Peter, who had a marked tendency to kowtow before degenerate Western ways, was so impressed by this remark that he levied a tax on all Russian beards...
...awful mess. But, they all add,what can you do about it?" he complained. He had opposed Dr. Van Waters' methods "in legislative hearings and from the floor of the Senate," but "no previous Commissioner has dared to differ with Dr. Van Waters. Even members of the legislature kowtow to her." LePresti's interest in Framingham was hardly limited to an investigation of the suicide. He felt that the Reformatory was a sinkhole of immorality and favoritism, and he was not reticent in telling readers of the American about...
...house, his father in hot pursuit. Young Mao reached the edge of a pond and threatened to jump in if his father came any nearer. "Demands and counter-demands were presented for cessation of the civil war," Mao recalled. "My father insisted that I apologize and kowtow . . . I agreed to give a one-knee kowtow if he would promise not to beat me. Thus the war ended, and from it I learned that when I defended my rights by open rebellion, my father relented, but when I remained meek and submissive, he only cursed and beat me the more...
Young Mao remembered the lesson, and modified it. In his long march to power, he knew how to appear meek when the occasion demanded. But he himself was never moved by meekness. China's new master is no man to settle-permanently-for a one-knee kowtow from an opponent...
...that it was "personal dislike" of Hughes by Major General Oliver Echols (wartime chief of Air Forces procurement) which blocked Hughes's efforts to speed building of the 200-ton "Hercules" and the XF-11 camera plane. And it was "Army hatred" of him, for his failures to kowtow to Army brass at Wright Field, said Hughes, that made him start spending for entertainment, as other airplane makers...