Word: politest
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...Indiana a "damned fool," and was required to retract his words. Again, in a 1953 argument with Michigan's acidulous Republican Representative Clare Hoffman, McCormack delivered an insult that is still recalled whenever Congressmen trade stories. "I would defend the Gentleman," he said, in a mockery of the politest parliamentary style, "because I have a minimum high regard for him." Once he called Republican Floor Leader Charles Halleck a "hijacker," and stuck his finger into Halleck's jowl for emphasis. But Indiana's Halleck comes from another hard political school, and he understands McCormack. "John McCormack...
...Japanese, who are among the world's politest people when sober, are notoriously violent when drunk. One word for a drunk in Japanese is tora-tiger. The police have been prohibited by the law from taming a tora unless he becomes overtly violent. Even then they could only politely take him into protective custody, put him in a paddy wagon whose walls were padded with foam rubber for his own protection, lock him up overnight, release him with a lecture in the morning. One remedial variation: tape-recording his drunken expostulations, then playing the tape back to his glowering...
...uneasy (and exaggerated) suspicion that Dwight Eisenhower-and hence U.S. foreign policy-would be in a state of drift from now until election time, and that the U.S. had already suffered a fall in prestige. French diplomats talked of "flottement" (vacillation) and the British of "vacuum." The politest way of expressing this was the London Daily Telegraph's feeling that Ike was a "consolidator," while Kennedy or Nixon would be "innovators." Under either Kennedy or Nixon, one ingredient of the Western alliance would soon be missing: the so-I-told-Winston and remember-back-in-Africa camaraderie that...
...Basket, Mother -There'll Be No Show Tonight." Another begins: "Early this morning, somewhere in between my orange juice and my No. 1 concubine, I got to thinking about Toynbee Doob . . . He had an extra pinkie on each hand. When Toynbee drank tea he was the politest bastard in the county...
...British, hitherto the politest, who delivered the sharpest retort to the insulting distortions of history implicit in Khrushchev's Berlin note. With tongue in cheek, the British wondered why, among other historical documents, the Russians did not mention the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which "made the outbreak of war inevitable," called Munich a lesson in appeasement to heed in Berlin now, and cuttingly recalled that because the Soviet Union had failed to honor the freedom of religion, press, speech and voting promised in the 1945 Potsdam agreement, "some 2,000,000 Germans have left East Germany rather than endure...