Word: preens
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Cinderellas were the Free City of Danzig and the Sultanate of Morocco. If they were offended, they at least sat humbly among their lentils last week. But official Washington awoke to the fact that the jealous elder sisters were beginning to preen themselves on their accomplishment, in a way that may prove troublesome to Mr. Kellogg...
Passing on through Bristol, Their Royal Highnesses visited a Settlement where one Thomas Preen, 16, presented the Duchess with what he described as "a drawing of a caterpillar playing leap-frog with a rabbit and a mouse...
...simply an argument advanced by a Victorian mother-in-law with urbane cynicism, who declares that the only test of true love is whether you can use your husband's toothbrush. The dialogue is conscious of its own glitter. The audience is aware that actors settle themselves, preen themselves, for the utterance of shining platitudes, universal conversation in the pseudo-Voltairian manner. Ethel Barrymore's acting is the stage Ethel of recent years, to which an Ethel-drawn audience responds with laughter, palpably content. Percy Hammond: "Miss Barrymore . . . slender, fair, 36 and super-charming...
Then, suddenly, nine hours had passed like a distorted dream, and the wind-god raged moaning up the northeast coast toward Pensacola. No more would sport coats and plumed hats" stroll at Hialea Race track. It was gone. No more would dandies strut and women preen in Carl Fisher's fashionable Flamingo Hotel. It was wrecked. Five hundred bodies soaked in the streets, some wretchedly askew under logs, others stretched out peacefully by the Chamber of Commerce. Where had been one mammoth mansion sat a lone bathtub. And ghouls peered about, tampered with corpses...
Every state in the Union has a specialty, a featured output or possession, which is the twig upon which that bright bird, sectional pride, may sit to preen its feathers. To Oregon its apples, Texas its longhorns, Kansas its jayhawks; the wheat-farms of Minnesota, the sandlots of Florida, the mammy-songs of Alabama and the golden whales of California. And Indiana, the lilac and honeysuckle state of Indiana, whose breeze is thick with fancies as its gardens are with bees-Indiana is the nursery of writers. So many are the literary people who have come from Indiana that when...