Word: squeakly
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...egregious Kenneth Widmerpool, whose fatuous careerism and brassbound egotism have provided veins of comedy running through all nine books. Widmerpool, an ambition addict who flourishes amidst the adversities of the rest of the world, turns up as a colonel, squeezing the epaulettes of power until the pips squeak. These exits and re-entrances emphasize that it is high time for Powell's publishers to provide a score to The Music of Time-not a musical score but a box score, giving the family trees and vital statistics of the more than 100 characters involved...
...hunger and exhaustion, and sometimes their bodies lay untouched for weeks. When they were finally hoisted onto trucks, one observer recalls, they were so frozen that "they gave a metallic ring." The silence of the city was broken only by bouts of German shellfire and, in winter, by the squeak of children's sleds bearing corpses to cemeteries...
...comment, etc. Always, the first term must pinpoint a feeling we have about the group being described. For instance, Lipton rules out calling prostitutes an anthology of pros, because the humor lies in the second term--anthology makes no poetic comment on prostitutes (a flourish of strumpets just might squeak...
...After school, youngsters hitched heavy canvas bags over their shoulders and set out through sycamore-shaded streets. They crisscrossed the broad lawns in front of white frame houses, tossing parcels from their bags up under porch swings and wicker chairs on the wide, front verandas. Then screen doors would squeak and bang, and children would squabble over who would carry them inside. A new issue of the Saturday Evening Post had arrived...
...discover that his floors did not squeak...