Word: snipe
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...hours the President and the House committee sat around the Cabinet table discussing ways & means of saving money. Mr. Hoover's main point was that Congress should amend certain laws to reduce mandatory expenses rather than snipe at the appropriation bills. The House committee wanted to merge the Army & Navy into one department of defense but the President would not even listen to such a proposal. A general 11 % cut in Federal salaries was favored by the Congressmen. Mr. Hoover countered with a proposition to cut the salaries of the President ($75,000 per year), Cabinet members ($15,000), Senators...
...Speaker called the janitor. The janitor called his assistant. His assistant called Electrician Fred Karns. Finally, over the protest of several legislators who fancied themselves as marksmen, it was decided that the electrician was the nimblest present, best suited for crawling to points of vantage from which to snipe the pigeons. Sportsman Karns provided himself with an air rifle recently taken from a small boy who had been caught hunting in the capitol grounds, shot six pigeons...
...daughter on Boar's Hill, five miles from Oxford, where his melancholy mien and rusty, plunging gait are a perennial peripatetic phenomenon. He founded the amateur Boar's Hill Players, who acted now Shakespeare, now Masefield; he himself once played the ghost in Hamlet, hinnying like a snipe...
...Political punsters and cartoonists opened their birdbooks to amplify their knowledge of the bird (Philohela Minor) whose name Commissioner Woodcock bears. An upland species of snipe, highly prized by sportsmen and epicures, the woodcock has a long, long bill and practically no tail at all. Its plumage is heavily mottled- brown, black, buff, grey-protective coloration for thickety ground. It can thrive only in wet (or at least moist) places, where it can probe for worms without bending or breaking its bill. That it may spy its enemies while it feeds, its eyes-large, nearsighted, goggling-are close together near...
Before plovers' eggs were put in a class with egret they, could be eaten (in season) at any smart London restaurant for the genteel price of one guinea ($5.10) per egg. "Plover" in restaurant parlance is a handy name for almost any "wader," vaguely similar to a snipe or sandpiper. The species most common in England (and the U. S.) is the ringed plover, "Billdeer." Crocodiles like plovers, not to eat but because the birds pick leeches and other parasites from saurian mouths. Also a sleepy crocodile knows that with a few plovers about it is safe to doze...