Word: rotgut
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...railroad worker in Houston's Fifth Ward, a ghetto that even today throbs with uneasily repressed violence. His parents separated when George was a boy, and he dropped out of school in the eighth grade, quickly becoming a terror on the streets. Drunk on rotgut wine, "Monkey" Foreman was a savage gang fighter. "When we started a fight, we'd look around to see if Monkey was there," recalls Don Thomas, a former gang member with Foreman. "You had two or three cats whipped...
...start, he is completely convincing as Cowboy Will Penny-illiterate, aging, and anything but bright. He doesn't even have a heart of gold; Gary Cooper would never have left a wounded pal to bleed his life away in a wagon outside while he loaded up on rotgut in a saloon. That's what Will Penny does, sitting there, scruffy and stupid, upending the bottle and croaking, "Sure burns a dollar's worth." It looks as if this is going to be an interesting experiment in antiheroics amid the great open spaces...
...Elizabeth sat conjugally by his side, interrupting every hour or so to ask: "Don't you think it's time we went home, Richard?" "Yes," replied the bilingual Burton. "When I've finished my drink, Garcon! Donnez-moi une autre bouteille de rotgut, s'il vous plait...
...surpasses himself as the dime-novel hero, Kid Shellen. A "good" killer, the Kid arrives in town unable to live up or even stand up to his legend. His eyes are bloodshot from poring over whisky labels. On ceremonial occasions he wears a corset. When he is primed with rotgut, his fast draw is apt to pull his pants...
...Rotgut," a word that sounds as if it were coined no later than Prohibition, meant much the same thing to Johnson; it was "bad beer" in his day. A Hollywood flesh peddler, i.e., actor's agent, has a philological ancestor in Johnson's London, where a pimp was a fleshmonger. "Bum" Dr. Johnson defined with magisterial simplicity as "the part on which...