Word: shrift
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...German planes dropped soldiers (with parachutes) behind Polish lines, where they reconnoitred, reported back to their army via small, portable radios. Poles captured them right & left, gave 'them short shrift. Over bombed Warsaw, the Poles erected a poor imitation of London's "balloon barrage," claimed that a German pilot got caught...
This does not mean, of course, that everybody will pass. In every class there are a certain percentage of gentlemen who prefer to loaf, or let other people do their work for them. With men of this breed the College will, and should make short shrift. Also there will be a few who are incapable of making the grade at college, no matter how hard they try. These, also, will feel the first tickling of the knife about their necks at the current "Hours." But the rest should find no particular difficulty with the tests...
When he was 18 young Braley got hold of a copy of Tom Hood's Rhymster, an experience which he compares to that of the youthful Keats on first looking into Chapman's Homer. Free verse and bizarre modern forms get short shrift from Rhymster Braley. The critics, in his opinion, know nothing about professional writing. And editors are a bad-mannered, incompetent, timid, unreliable lot of numbskulls with "more taboos than a South African savage...
...underlings. Rao, onetime boxer, was shaving when Deputy Commissioner Marcus ordered him to get along with the rest of his henchmen to solitary cells. Prisoner Rao insolently remarked that he would when he finished his toilet. Deputy Marcus, a boxer in his time at West Point, made short shrift of that kind of talk...
...privileges were merely payment for their services of protection and consolation and continued to demand those privileges long after they had ceased to do their duty. Society today is little tolerant of useless shibboleths. If we demand our privileges and refuse our duties we cannot expect so long a shrift as was granted the "ancien regime," and we can only hope that our fall may be, not less sudden, but less fatal...