Word: racketed
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Anent the origin of the term "racket," I quote verbatim from Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1823), a definition which antedates the origin described by you (TIME...
Badminton was first introduced in the United States in 1878. The game consists of driving a specially made shuttle over a light net five feet high with a finely made long-handled racket, and can be played by either two or four people. At present the Badminton Club and the University Club are the only two groups providing Badminton facilities in Boston...
Today's system of collecting degrees as the only means of scholastic progress has been scored before this, but the President's criticism goes beyond the familiar decrying of the Ph.D. racket and makes a constructive suggestion for improvement of the system. The recommendation calls for the creation of "a group of fellowships for men not over twenty-five." These men are to be selected "upon evidence of remarkable promise"; they are to work with "a body of older fellows eminent in different fields" in "surroundings most adapted to entice and fructify the imagination." More notable, the holders...
Very fine and praiseworthy your insistence that ''racket" be kept a word undefiled by loose usage. But why not, while you were at it, tell the origin and specific applications of the word so that we can know how to use it properly...
...Racket" seems to have come originally from the vaudeville world, where it connoted the form of entertainment in which a performer specialized. "His racket is mammy songs." "She's got a good racket -clog-dancing and trained poodles." From this it entered general circulation to connote any method, especially an easy one, a hackneyed one, or a smart new one with an element of trickery, by which people got along in the world. Its later, criminal adaptation has two shades of meaning: 1) the whole general ''Racket" of preying on society by any and all illegal means...