Word: poked
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Copper-Bellied Corpse. The American folk who emerge from this lore are robust, daredevil, imaginative, fond of broad humor, tender love, great deeds, crude, rude, sometimes full of noble sentiment, sometimes intolerant. They glorify outlaws (Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid), poke fun at woodsmen (Mike Fink, Davy Crockett), sanctify Johnny Appleseed. The U.S. gift for tall talk is flaunted in Sven, the Hundred Proof Irish man, and speeches by General Buncombe ("Sir, we want elbow room - the continent, the whole continent - and nothing but the continent"). The U.S. talent for epithet is flaunted...
...Progressives are realists. They know that the United States cannot buy the friendship of other nations. . . . Progressives will not cooperate in any efforts to force the United States to buy an international pig in a beautiful poke. . . ." Then the Progressive Party framed its foreign-policy plank: "Our greatest contribution to world peace will be determined by what America does for Americans...
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes, Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes, Now, although the room grows chilly, I haven't the heart to poke poor Billy...
John Barrymore lived all his brilliant, violent, much-married life in glass houses. No biography can hope to pull up any blinds; it can only poke under carpets and rummage in desk drawers. In Good Night, Sweet Prince (Viking; $3.50) Barrymore's lusty pal Gene Fowler (The Great Mouthpiece, The Great Magoo) has done just that. Gaudy, gossipy, with a sob-sister lining to its Rabelaisian hide, Good Night, Sweet Prince honors Barrymore without emasculating him. From it the Great Profile paradoxically emerges both more tarnished and more dazzling, more fantastic and more real...
Bulgaria's shaky government got no rest from proddings by Germany's enemies to quit Germany's war. Latest poke came last week from Moscow's Pravda and the pen of Bulgar Georgi Dimitroff, onetime defendant at Naziism's Reichstag fire trial and secretary of the late unlamented Communist International (see p. 20). Warned Bulgar Dimitroff: "The national policy of Bulgaria, from the viewpoint of her future, demands loyal cooperation with her neighbors. . . . Only by breaking with Germany at once and assisting in the defeat of Germany will Bulgaria save herself from catastrophe...