Word: popinjay
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...Brown's definition: "A human trifler, a man of straw and self-conceit ... in the popinjay class ... To call a man a niffle is to put him in his place, which is next to nowhere...
Niffle meant a "human trifler, a man of straw and self-conceit ... in the popinjay class ... To call a man a niffle is to put him in his place, which is next to nowhere...
Sniped gum-champing Edward J. Flynn, Democratic National Chairman: "[The Mayor is] a vain popinjay...
...keep in touch with his vast command. He is physically tough, and rides, plays golf, goes swimming even when crises are thickest. His calm is unshatterable, he can be hurried by no man. He is sociable but completely unaffected, and loves to quote Hotspur's contemptuous speech about popinjay staff officers who shine so brisk, and smell so sweet, and talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman, of guns and drums and wounds. His blood runs thick with soldiery: his first ancestor in Britain was a Deveauville who came over with William the Conqueror, and he is the third general...
...another wife. (The second Mrs. Eaton was still in Virginia as security for his unpaid bills.) But, though past 60, Eaton was not content with his income and ran deeply into debt. After attempting to bribe his creditor's agent and being proved quilty of perjury, the dapper little popinjay was dragged off to King's Bench Prison at Southwark. There his incessant demands for scholastic and clerical privileges fell on deaf ears; and, within sight of John Harvard's old home, this college's first President died a convict...