Word: raffish
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Algiers still has its beggars, and seven out of every ten Casbah residents have tuberculosis. What makes the city bustle is its newly moneyed middle class, mostly of French, Corsican, Italian or Spanish descent, though many Arabs have done well too. But there is little of the raffish night life of the typical boom town; Algiers' one luxury nightclub is half empty on week nights. "The Algerian businessman," said one French official, "may keep a rakish sports car and luxurious villa on the Riviera, but in Algiers he's middle class, respectable, and rather mean...
...Australian equivalent of the American word "limey." Aside from the overflow of British jails, Australia's original immigrants often migrated out of poverty, and many were members of Britain's minority races -the Scots, Irish and Welsh. Making a hard living, Australians developed into a tough, contumacious, raffish people, inveterately hostile to authority, and looking at the world with a fresh, irreverent...
...Soup needs more sass and zest. But Soup, with the story it has to tell, need not only be as frothy as champagne, or as French as snails; it can also, and with rewards of its own, be as French as money. There is nothing girlishly rueful or gallantly raffish about Marie-Paule; though now and then touching, she is cynical and hard. "I don't forgive," she says, "even the ones who have done nothing to me." She was not ruined or misled; she was never sentimentally tempted or morally torn; the one time love came...
...special local deities. Chichicastenango Indians lit candles in the church, then offered candles, liquor and even crosses on a three-foot-high stone figure of the pagan god Pascual-Abaj on a hill behind the church. Santiago Atitlán's favorite was Maximón, a raffish deity with four hats and an uninhibited libido...