Word: riffraff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...most inspired creator of synthetic surnames since Charles Dickens). There were Lady Circumference and her numskull son, little Lord Tangent; Mrs. Beste-Chetwynde (later Lady Margot Metroland) and her son, Peter Pastmaster; Sir Alastair Digby-Vaine-Trumpington and Viola Chasm. This glittering, blandly selfish, pretentiously stupid upper-class riffraff was to romp through most of Waugh's later books, sharing their futile power for pointless and appalling mischief with such later creations as raffish, rascally Basil Seal, motorbiking Father Rothschild (a member of a younger branch of the banking family, who had become a Jesuit priest), and the American...
Footpads, pickpockets and housebreakers, with all the riffraff who lived by their wits, filled the underworld of London's alleys and gin shops with an argot of which traces still survive. "Frisking" meant searching, then as now. A watch was a "tick," a handkerchief was a "wipe," and "wipe priggers" (pickpockets) flourished among theater standees. A glass of gin was a "flash of lightning',, and too many flashes often lit the way to "Tuck 'em Fair" (the place of execution...
...London Airport, where they were greeted by Britain's aging, able Lord Pethick-Lawrence, local Indians were out before dawn in coal trucks, bicycles and buses. A policeman grumbled: "You can't tell by looking at these Indians who are the VIPs and who are the riffraff. One day you're arresting a fellow and the next he turns up as an important bloke. . . . You never can tell who to push around...
...rented Atlanta hall Columbian Burke wildly harangued his audience of riffraff. Suddenly there was a crash of glass; a cloud of tear gas sent the listeners coughing and choking toward the exit. His lean face bright with sweat, Burke leaned through the broken window and shook his fist. He bawled: "Come back here, you Jew. We'll get you yet." To emergency police he shouted accusingly: "Some Communist...
...First Ward was a politician's paradise. Its bawdy districts, "Little Cheyenne" and "the Levee," were solid with gambling joints, peep shows, flophouses and saloons, and harbored the riffraff of half a continent. The First Ward's blocks of bordellos ran from haughty establishments like the Everleigh house (wine: $12 downstairs; $15 in a room), to a "Bedbug Row" of noisome prostitutes' cribs. The jangle of its pianos never stopped...