Word: rascall
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Beginning in 896, there was a veritable epidemic of papal brevity: four Popes in 20 months. Boniface VI, who died after 15 days, was a rascal who had been dismissed from several ecclesiastical offices. His successor, Stephen VI (or VII), had the decomposing body of his predecessor-but-one, Formosus I, disinterred, clothed in papal robes, and set on the throne in St. Peter's; whereupon Stephen called a synod to "depose" him, had the dead man's blessing forefinger cut off, and the corpse flung into the Tiber...
...gameness of gamins. Settling into the day-to-day routine of a comfortable French provincial town, Truffaut introduces us, through loosely coordinated vignettes, to all the little grade school tykes and all their mischievous goings-on. This stuff could have become soupy, but Truffaut has retained a clever rascal's nose for stage-stealing devilry. (One example: the town detective's daughter refused to accompany her parents to a restaurant without a mangy toy elephant. But when they leave her at home, she pleads abuse to the neighbors, who fall for it and prepare her a special gourmet care package...
...phrase, but it's doubtful whether Nixon the lawyer ever really understood the moral philosophy behind it. In principle, justice is served and truth is most effectively discovered when two sides-one doing its best to attack, the other to defend-contend in open court. Even the rascal, the murderer, the rapist is "entitled to his day in court." In practice, the idea clears the consciences of expensive lawyers who get rich defending the worst of clients or the most dubious practices of their best clients. Since a trial is combat, nearly anything goes...
...Morgan. Big changes: De Gramont, says Morgan, was the strict, rather European father, for instance, and something of a male chauvinist; Morgan, says Morgan, is a permissive American father of two, and an earnest believer in feminism. De Gramont kissed the slender hands of titled ladies, the rascal; Morgan, 45, helps his wife Nancy with the dishes and is not likely to be invited to dinners where footmen stand behind each place...
...late Gene Fowler was a thinking man's John Wayne. In half a century behind the typewriter, he built a name as a swashbuckling reporter, a capable novelist, a prosperous Hollywood script doctor and a painstaking biographer of such romantic rascals as John Barrymore (Good Night, Sweet Prince) and Jimmy Walker (Beau James). In the course of his career he became something of a romantic rascal himself, a legendary prodigy in bar and bedroom alike...