Word: picking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...appeal strikes many foreigners as the epitome of the American success story, and so they adopt English words that imply success itself: super, blue chip, boom, status symbol, summit. Some of that, clearly, is just snobbery. Through U.S. television, says British Grammarian Randolph Quirk, a foreigner can pick up an Americanized vocabulary "if you want to show you're with it and talking like Americans, the most fashionable people on earth." On the other hand, some upper-class Egyptian youths think it is chic to use Anglo-Saxon four-letter words like--well, merde...
...establish congeniality in the commission," he said last week, looking back on four solid months of some of the most intensive work he has ever done. "We had to pick people who fit the work for the different parts of the investigation. We called on everyone. We listened to everybody. And they wrote the report. It may be a little uneven, but that is worth...
...King, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, Son House, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson and a lot of old lesser lights who still sing the blues off the front porches of tumbledown shacks. "Check this out," White said at one point. "We're going to pick up a blind man that's going to show us how to get to this other guy's house...
...blues would disappear someday because kids are not much interested in it and anyway, times are not as hard as they once were. Son said his first guitar was a Gene Autry model that cost $8.50, and at the time he was being paid $1 a hundredweight to pick cotton, so he had to pick 850 lbs. of cotton to pay for it. That was hard times. And when he was digging graves, he got $15 a grave, and the worst business ever was a three week period when nobody died. "Then all of a sudden they all started dying...
...save himself because he was due in New York City next day to play at the Washington Square Church, 135 West 4th Street. He said when he is in New York, he likes to slip out on the street and play a tune or two because you can pick up cash quickly that way. Then he got his guitar, an expensive Martin, and after making sure there were no women in earshot, he swung into Catfish Blues, a song so lowdown nasty he said "I ain't gon' give you too much." Most of the verses were difficult to understand...