Word: means
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even in two trips a newcomer picks up a good deal of lore. Pigeon-toed prints usually mean a man is running. You can tell which predator killed an animal by the way the carcass was entered: dogs and wolves eat through the back, lions enter through the rib cage. An old man's tracks tend to be more regular than a young man's. Because shoes conform to a man's feet, you can later identify in court the feet that made a track, even if the shoes used during the crime were thrown away...
...deal: a guilty plea in return for a lighter sentence or reduced charges. The accused's "day in court" lasts only a minute or two. In one such case in California, a defendant pronounced guilty of assault with a deadly weapon exclaimed in bewilderment: "What? You mean I've been tried...
...case docket and a black bag stuffed with lawyer's briefs. His territory is his state's western panhandle. It is sparse ranch and farm country, though railroads hauling low-sulfur coal have made the local junction, Alliance (pop. 10,000), a boom town. The mean Midwest weather that Judge Moran encounters has not changed since Lawyer Abraham Lincoln rode Illinois' Eight Circuit. Carl Sandburg described it: "Mean was the journey in the mud of spring thaws, in the blowing sleet or snow and icy winds of winter...
...Roman Catholic, he has eight children. Child custody cases leave him drained. "We are asked to play God in these cases, and you can't be God. The touchstone is 'the best interests of the child.' Isn't that a lovely phrase? What does it mean?" Criminal sentencing sometimes sends him walking around town, "chewing on it like a dog with a bone. You drop it and pick it up again and chew...
...simple pronunciation: "We do maf work" for "We do mathematics work." Some of the differences lie in odd verb tenses: "She-ah hit us" for "She will hit us." More often the difference involves the verb "to be." Green Readers say, "He be gone" when they mean, "He is gone a good deal of the time"; "He been gone" when they mean, "He's been gone for a long while"; and "He gone" when they mean, "He is gone right now." Some is pure idiom. "To sell wolf tickets" (pronounced wuf tickets) means to challenge somebody to a fight...