Word: overhearer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...been superimposed annually for a decade. The Chicago press, after months of extravagant paeans about Chicago's towering new hotels, newspaper cathedrals and dizzy spires for housing jewelers, oil men, furniture merchants, athletes, chicle-venders, and to support a Methodist cross, had not yet quieted down sufficiently to overhear the murmurs of reaction. But such murmurs there were, even in Chicago. Three universities had in the past year embarked upon skyscrapers of learning-at Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Chicago. Detroit was contemplating the advent of an 85-story prodigy, complete with barbershops, drug stores, restaurants and a car-checking system...
...wedge. Several weeks later when he had reached California, he happened to be sitting in a cafe in San Francisco with another elderly man and unwittingly told the other the new development in Harvard's offense. The only trouble with his disclosure was that a Yale man happened to overhear the conversation and wrote to Walter Camp word for word what he had heard...
...agent for the Post Office Department, wrote to a London evening newspaper recalling that once he installed two "beautiful telephones in ivory and gold" for the exclusive use of the late King Edward. The monarch requested that they be installed in such a way that the operators could not overhear his conversation. The Post Office authorities demurred. According to their regulations they had a positive right and duty to censor any messages coming over their wires. But King Edward insisted and the Post Office desisted, installed the telephones as requested...
...often asks: "How do authors collect dialect expressions?" The answer is, I think, usually, that they don't. Ernest Poole once told me that now that the saloon had vanished as a place in which to overhear conversations, the bus top was the ideal place for garnering a store of epithets, tender and vituperative. That may be; but I am practically certain that with John Weaver it is largely a question of things heard on the run, of the seeping in of idiom, of a certain eager understanding of the way the ordinary mind works. I doubt the accuracy...
...Andersens, as the common legend runs, but are built up out of the subconscious wishes of children. But if you want to find out more about that, you must ask Freud, who, no doubt, knows more about fairy tales than most of us. . ." I suppose that we may soon overhear from the nursery, "Now, Mary, stop crying, and mama'll read you some pretty stories out of the Satyricon." Incidentally, I wonder what complex led Mr. Train to use "woken" as a past participle...