Word: planking
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...surprisingly agile for a man of over 70. After throwing the lever that released the trap, he would always spring out on the plank over the trap, and, taking hold of the still quivering rope, would look to see if the man had dropped satisfactorily, and then look around and say: "Dropped lovely, didn't he?" This usually managed to make at least one witness faint...
...sist Street, where a new department store was going up, the owners, thoughtful of New Yorkers' idle curiosity, had put windows in the plank boardings, so the public could watch the construction job (not as commonplace a sight in the U.S. as it was a generation ago). Next door other workmen were putting a new face on St. Patrick's. Down the street, the sign on the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas said that Dr. Joseph Sizoo would preach the next Sunday on "When Dawn Comes...
...your head, reader? What recent gains in sensibility have you to register? Do you read or think as much as you used to? You are aware no doubt that your consumption of tobacco and alcohol has practically doubled . . . you will plank down three quid for a bottle of Scotch, you can't be trusted with a railway towel or a piece of hotel soap . . . and [you] write to the Times against Picasso; you're more antiSemitic, even, than before...
...buries a treasure chest, sails a King's ship into Madagascar waters, knocks off a number of chiseling colleagues, and at long last gets the halter while young lovers Randolph Scott and Barbara Britton make for the altar. All this and more is accomplished without teeth-clenched daggers, plank-walkings, or hoistings of the Jolly Roger. But this new version has not enough energy and inventiveness to take the place of the old, dependable pirate-movie clich...
...latter question, involving that of where you may be now, there is a solemnity even added to that of death, making us who are in attendance alike afraid to look on you and to look off you, and making those below start at the least sound of a creaking plank in the floor...