Word: origin
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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While Russian and American newsmen comment fiercely on each other's origin and the United Nations becomes snarled in a welter of tedious recriminations, a vicious behind-the-scenes economic battle comes far closer to splitting the East and West than any so-called ideological warfare. Iran, keystone of an important Anglo-American oil reservoir, is the stage for an oil dispute that threatens to boil over momentarily. Skittish over Russian expansion towards the Persian Gulf, the United States has influenced Iran to disavow a proposed oil-rights contract with Russia in a move that has Moscow frothing. This most...
...month later, Genoa customs authorities notified him that the two tables of intricate design were stalled there. Unless Covre forwarded a "certificate of origin" they could not be shipped. To get the certificate, he had to make several trips to his local chamber of commerce. The chamber needed two more copies of the original bill, which also had to be registered at the registration office and visaed by the price control office...
...before knocking 'em down. He had used this technique on Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel. But he had also been found guilty of playing with metaphysics, a reprehensible sin in Russia, and he had depicted Marxism as an evolution from earlier philosophy. Thundered Zhdanov: "The origin of Marxism was a real discovery, a revolution in philosophy." In the wake of Zhdanov's thunder, 46 of Aleksandrov's colleagues and coworkers, among them doubtless some who had written rave reviews, slavishly climbed the Zhdanov bandwagon with similar denunciations, and 36 more were awaiting their turns to speak...
Another Telegraph correspondent suggested that it was merely VIPS (the wartime phrase for Very Important Persons) spelled backwards. "With demobilization, the term came into civvy street [and] received its demob suit with all its original connotation-that of a person having a good time at the expense of others." Gossip Writer Charles Graves claimed: "My deep research into the source of the word shows that it was originally used colloquially by race-gangs [for] a shady character who lives by his wits, but without the physical or mental courage to show violence or turn burglar." A bookish reporter...
Whatever its origin, whatever its meaning, the word "spiv" had definitely become a part of the King's English. Last week the Right Honorable Ralph Assheton, M.P., escorted it formally into Hansard's (the British Congressional Record) and immortality. Britain, he said on the floor of Parliament, was sinking into a socialist swamp of "spiv-economy...