Word: ragtag
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...villain of the piece is Gaspard's aunt, put in charge of the boy because his parents are unsolid citizens who ragtag about the countryside peddling neckties. A mightily mundane soul, the aunt has lofty plans for Gaspard-was not one of his ancestors mayor of Lominval, and another chief of the town's wolf-exterminating brigade? But the never-never land claims the boy; sent into the forest to gather mushrooms, he is soon lost to Lominval and launched on a mad, careering plunge of adventure...
...leader was a wellborn, well-to-do daredevil of 29, named Fidel Castro. As chief of a 1953 uprising in eastern Santiago de Cuba, the island's No. 2 city, Lawyer Castro had been jailed, amnestied, exiled. In Mexico this year he pulled together a ragtag force, dubbed it the July 26 Movement (for the date of the Santiago attack), drilled it at a ranch near Mexico City. Last month Castro, crying "Liberty or death in 1956," called on Strongman Batista to step down and form a national unity government or face revolution. In Havana Castro's followers...
After nearly four years on Broadway and a successful movie run, Garson Kanin's ragtag yarn was an eventual certainty for TV. It also marked Kanin's first crack at TV directing. He was surprised at the prissiness of TV censors: four of the several references to Billie as a "broad" had to go. Anything that might be construed as a reference to mental illness was also cut: "crazy broad" became "dizzy broad." "Off her nut" became "blow her stack." Suggestions of physical impairment were primly deleted, viz., Billie, trying on her glasses, to Harry: "What...
...French doggedly reported 79 rebels killed one day, 109 the next, but the attacks went on. A ragtag rebel "army" of not more than 20,000 men was tying down a French force that will reach 330,000 men by month's end. Minister Resident Robert Lacoste declared a state of siege for two eastern Algerian departments, and in western Oran ordered all able-bodied men from 18 to 48 to report for militia duty...
...French word last week. Ood-ka meant U.D.C.A., the Union de Défense des Commercants et des Artisans. And U.D.C.A. meant Pierre Poujade, the rabble-rousing bookseller, and his ragtag crusade against taxes, politicians and parliamentary government. Though the Poujadists had entered more candidates (about 800) than any other party, had disrupted countless meetings with storms of vituperation and vegetables, and generally raised welts on the public weal, the experts had not taken young Pierre Poujade and his bray-voiced "antis" very seriously. But Poujade's bully-boy movement of shopkeepers, farmers, artisans and small businessmen...