Word: personable
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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...broken bones and bruised joints. I pay $300 for the use of a small room for 38 weeks, nearly $8 per week, - a very steep rent, considering the building never cost the College a cent, and the rents are all clear gain. Now, if I paid a private person $8 per week for a room in his house, I rather think that person would consent to keep the entry brilliantly illuminated without any demur. When the College lets me a room for a certain time for a fixed price, it stands in the same relation to me as a private...
...about the general management of the race. The judges and committees who could not tell which boat won, whether Wesleyan or Amherst was second, the order or time of the last boats, and who left the flag on the western bank to be placed by some third person at the last moment, present a picture of mismanagement too deplorable to need any comment. They were appointed to decide the race, however close; the fact that any of these questions have arisen proclaims their inability to fill the positions assigned them...
...places a "rowl" or "rush." The analogy between the sudden ejection of water from a pipe and the quick and forcible expulsion of words from the mouth probably gave rise to this word, which so aptly expresses what it is intended to by sound merely. At some colleges a person of a religious turn of mind is variously denominated "evangelical," "long-ear," and "donkey." I confess myself as ignorant of the similarity which exists between these terms and that which they define as any from the ranks of the might be. While at Harvard "one of the b'hoys" means...
...tendency for long calls and annoying affection for your cigarettes, his sobriquet will be "Fig"; if he persists, "the Fig." These epithets convey more meaning than is at first apparent; they are indications of certain traits in one's character, and just as they are agreeable or disagreeable a person can safely conclude that he, too, is so, especially in those things which they are intended...
...Gordon, Farmer Jonathan Hastings was a man from whom the students used to hire horses. He would use the expression, "A Yankee good horse," to denote an excellent good horse. The students gave him the name of Yankee Jon. Yankee became a by-word to denote a silly, awkward person, and being carried from college was thus circulated through the country, and was at length taken up and applied as a cant-word to New-Englanders in common, bearing with it a tinge of reproach, and has ultimately come to be used by foreigners in mentioning Americans when they wish...