Word: riffraff
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...when the Loyalists lost, mother and son threw themselves on his untender mercies. When they arrived in France, he met them in a crowd of other refugees. Ignoring the boy, the father took one look at his wife and snapped, "You turn up with all this riffraff Hate the World. Still, Tanguy was happy in the little house outside Vichy where they settled, and for a while he felt like "an ordinary boy again." But the parents quarreled, and his mother decided to move on. The police arrested the woman and child on vague political charges. "Who denounced...
...shoulder 900 miles away. They shared the view with millions who, between the humdrum of quiz shows and soap operas, watched the paratroopers effect the historic entry of nine Negro students into the Little Rock school. Viewers also saw the troops double-timing to round up sullen riffraff, heard white students uttering words of hatred-and tolerance. TV news directors broke into network programs at will that day, eleven times on CBS, eight on NBC, for spots averaging four minutes each (and losing each network two commercials). ABC also aired an on-the-spot pickup late...
Your making a composite picture of a motley crew of trigger-happy poets, callow youths, delinquent teenagers, gun molls and other Hungarian riffraff and trying to foist them off on us Americans as the "Man of the Year" is a piece of journalism that is not only unique but should stand out as the acme of effrontery...
Bowlers & Rozzers. Novelist Manko-witz evidently sets up these two old human ruins as symbols of man's condition on earth, with well-meaning officials as their natural enemies. The officials are the book's runts and spivs and riffraff-the ones who have fared best under the Welfare State. Old Cock pegs them down (to quote the most printable of his memorable vocabulary) as bowler-hatted, bean-eyed, lousy, bootlicking Picklewaters. The old man is quite a social thinker. After one brush with authority-represented by an arrogant doorman-he reflects: "If we have to take...
...best of the Soviet offerings was The Cicada (Mosfilm), an adaptation of a Chekhov story. It is a relentless dissection of a frivolous woman with delusions of culture, and of the effete salon riffraff that surrounded her in the days of the Czar. For the days of the commissars, the Soviets did less well, e.g., An Unfinished Novel (Lenfilm), in which all the resources of Soviet medicine fail to cure a paralyzed engineer, but when the girl doctor of his dreams rushes to his bedside in the last reel, he walks again...