Word: rotgut
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...like a Western Union clerk on the analyst's couch. Morris offers many rewarding moments of major excitement and minor truth. But he deliberately invites comparison with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and beside these great American romantic realists, Morris looks perhaps adult but certainly dull. Where Fitzgerald could turn rotgut into champagne, Morris turns champagne into Alka-Seltzer...
...appear again in Sweet Thursday, which is really a return visit to Cannery Row. It reads like stuff that has been salvaged from the wastebasket. All the characters in Sweet Thursday (who live in Monterey, Calif., Steinbeck's home territory) have a lot in common: rotgut whisky in their bellies, leather in their hides, gold in their hearts and bats in their belfries...
...pure George Bellows-a seedy Bowery-type bar in the year 1912, littered with slumped and sleeping drunken bums.* Soaks of all descriptions-a Harvard man, a British infantry captain, a Boer War correspondent, a Negro gambler, an unbadged police lieutenant, a disillusioned anarchist-they had been reduced by rotgut to creatures of one baggy shape. What kept them hanging by a claw to life was the kindness of the drunken-bum saloonkeeper (finely played by Dudley Digges), and their pipe dreams, their mumbling that tomorrow would turn up a winning card or bring forth a better...
Major General Schwengel's plan, which had the industry's blessing, sounded dazzlingly simple, and fine for the U.S. stomach, which has lately been assaulted by more & more rotgut.* The plan: that U.S. distillers should buy 50,000,000 gallons of Cuban cane alcohol at 80? a gal. They would resell this to the Government at 50? a gal. in exchange for permission to withdraw 35,000,000 gal. of good U.S. grain alcohol at 90? a gal. and to turn it into good U.S. prewar-style potables. This was supposed 1) to add at least...
...young friend is a sergeant pilot-making $144 a month. He can afford the bootleg liquor. So he's not learning to drink beer or good whiskey on his nights off-but to drink rotgut straight. As he told me this morning, amid groans, "the stuff tastes so terrible, the only thing you can do is to get drunk as quick as possible so you can't taste...