Word: spits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ironist's self-knowledge. The author manages to make him credible and even more or less persuades the reader to accept such verbal acupuncture as this: "Old it is true. But mark you, sir, I shall never be so old or frail that I could not spit the likes of you on the point of a rapier like a poor sparrow. I would cut you clean from your high beard to your lower one, where all your brains dangle...
Human Touch. Changes seemed to be glacial under former commanding General James Polk, an old-fashioned "spit and polish" soldier who retired last spring. He was succeeded in June by General Michael S. Davison, 54, who formerly commanded Field Force II in Viet Nam and served as Commandant at West Point. Davison, rated by a Pentagon colleague as "a professional with a human touch," is already having an impact. After an inspection, Davison pronounced the Army's barracks "a scandal and a disgrace," and will supervise the spending of $70 million earmarked to refurbish the worst of them...
...Street barracks, an imposing brick quadrangle in the midst of the city's black ghetto, insist on maintaining the values that were the U.S. military's before it went mod. Here the emphasis, indeed the very raison d'être, is the preservation of spit-and-polish discipline. Let the other services allow beer in the barracks or sideburns in the field. Not the Marines, where tough tradition continues to be served. Since 1957, the spring and summer parades at Eighth and I have been an integral part of that mystique...
Easy Skill. Classifying keeps many an otherwise idle bureaucrat occupied. Busiest of all are Defense Department employees who bring, as might be expected, a rare spit and polish to the job. More than 300 Defense officials, says Florence, have been given "original" authority to classify documents; hundreds of thousands of others have what is termed "derivative" power to classify. A virtual army marches through the Pentagon shooting down reams of innocent documents-truly a case of documental genocide. "In the past several years," says ex-classifier Florence, "I have not heard one person in the Department of Defense say that...
Caprifole is a lovely word. If anything it is a shade too lovely, something to be tasted, rolled over the tongue, chewed lightly, savored and then, perhaps, not swallowed but spit discreetly into a tub of clean shavings. But what does it mean? The first dictionary to come to hand, an old Webster's, does not list caprifole at all. The unabridged Random House mentions only "caprifoliaceous: belonging to the Caprifoliaceae, a family of plants including the honeysuckle, elder, viburnum, snowberry...