Word: snook
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...beauteous daughters* of Baron Redesdale, scandalized her equally Tory family by joining Esmond. Fuming, Baron Redesdale made Decca a ward in chancery, thus making it illegal for any Englishman to marry her without the High Court's consent. Decca and Esmond cocked a long-distance snook, cried: "We both regard marriage mainly as a convenience. . . ." (Few months later they compromised with convention by getting married in a civil ceremony.) Last fortnight they arrived in Manhattan on their first visit to the U. S. Said Esmond Romilly last week: "We came here to get away from a terrible, deathlike atmosphere...
When they met again, hotheaded Homer Martin had obviously failed to be converted. Standing on his rights as U.A.W.'s elected president and cocking a rebellious snook at John L. Lewis himself, Mr. Martin summarily dismissed four of his vice presidents, including the Messrs. Frankensteen and Mortimer, and Secretary-Treasurer George Addes. He told six restive board members they would lay themselves "wide open to suspension" if they left the meeting. As one, the six walked out, leaving President Martin & friends in command of a union now publicly split...
Such was H. L. Mencken's first gleeful antic during the first week of the loftiest newspaper job in his career, the editorship of the staid Evening Sun. Thus was Mencken, his pale blue eyes agoggle, his single-breasted suit stretched across his bountiful belly, cocking a snook at his eager literary undertakers. Four years ago his plentiful enemies rushed him to his grave when he ended a nine-year editorship of the American Mercury. Said an American Spectator obituary: "It was most fitting that his last pieces were contributed to an ideologically bankrupt American Mercury and that intellectual...
...raised and seldom settled by letter-writers in the Times have been : Are there any brains in the British Army? Why isn't British ice cream any better (this was headed "Strawberry or Vanilla?")? Who is the oldest Etonian? What is the derivation of the phrase "cocking the snook" (thumbing the nose...
Finally the snook of Adolf Hitler was cocked at all Europe this week as Der Führer announced that Germany considers no longer valid that part of the Treaty of Versailles which, as not many non-Europeans still remember, vests control of all the principal German rivers in the hands of International Commissions. By tearing up this page of the tattered Treaty, Herr Hitler did nothing of immediate practical effect but Central European countries like Czechoslovakia, much of whose goods passes over German rivers, took Der Führer's move as an act of derisive menace corresponding...