Word: skittish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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British men, he noted, no longer take off their hats as they walk by London's Cenotaph (monument to Britain's war dead), or for the passing of a funeral or the flag. Women no longer bow when they meet; autoists no longer defer to skittish horses and their nervous riders on their way to Hyde Park's Rotten Row. Women stand in buses and trains while men and boys sit in comfort (a form of rudeness common even in non-Socialist communities...
Italian friends said that he was more skittish than ever about marriage. The town gawked at the idea that she was chucking the movies, then brushed it skeptically aside. Next day, in an interview in Rome with the New York Post Home News's Earl Wilson, Actress Bergman backtracked a little, but left it plain that she was fed up with the life of a movie star...
Every comely stenographer on the Navy's Quonset Point Air Station near Providence had been acting a little skittish lately. The reason was the big, annual all-station ball for the base's 3,900 sailors and civilian personnel. This year, the big feature was the election of "Miss Quonset Point." The triumphant queen was to be crowned at the ball; the commandant would escort her in the grand march. Everyone who bought a ticket got a vote, and sales were brisk...
...crunchee chair . . . so kind of pipee and bookee" beside the log fire (probably smokee). Her chosen prey is a morose baby specialist (Cary Grant). When he tries to escape, she lures him back toward the log fire by flirting with her boss (Franchot Tone). The boss is not skittish about marriage; he has tried it before. To knowing moviegoers, that sods him down. He stays in the running, all the same, until the ingenious huntress invents a third swain (Eddie Albert), meant to be a home-town admirer who yearns to take her away from it all. For a while...
...Will Menninger himself is a convincing explanation of why the public is getting less skittish about psychiatry. Plainly neither a crackpot nor a "foreigner," Psychiatrist Menninger is a big (6 ft. 1 in., 189 lbs.), friendly "nice guy." He is genuinely modest about holding practically all the top posts in his profession ("They shoved me up there"). He takes his job of promoting psychiatry as seriously as if he were a Midwestern drummer selling widgets; he used to carry in his pocket a little black book full of jokes and limericks, ready for impromptu speeches at medical dinners. (He lost...