Word: snook
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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...
...Final snook of the German week to be cocked was that of Finance Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk. Replying to a speech in which British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden recently said that Germany in the period of Reparations borrowed 18 billion marks and paid less than eight billion, the Count by implication called Mr. Eden a liar. "The losses Germany suffered through tribute," roared Count Schwerin von Krosigk, "far exceeded the capital lent...
More than a snook was cocked at the British Navy last week when the German Navy officially admitted for the first time that it is secretly building a warship of the largest size, the Ersatz Hannover of 35,000 tons. This will be the Fatherland's first fullsize capital ship since the Great War. Two days after the Ersatz Hannover was officially announced, Berlin's semi-official military weekly sprang the further revelation that yet another 35,000-tonner will be rushed to completion to help cock the German national snook...
Finally the snook of Adolf Hitler was cocked at all Europe this week as Der Führer announced that Germany considers no longer valid that part of the Treaty of Versailles which, as not many non-Europeans still remember, vests control of all the principal German rivers in the hands of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...