Word: sucker
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Honest Buck Lane freely admits to his readers when a careless deputy gets played for a sucker: "When he returned to his car, his pistol a 44-40 single action, his tear gas billy and 4 boxes of shells . . . was flat gone, it's getting rough when thieves rob the law." But usually, in Lane's letters, the forces of decency triumph. The other day, a fly-by-night peddler who was "after the cotton money" invaded Wharton County: "He said, well I'll buy a license and I said we don't sell licenses...
...year-old training wizard from Parnell, Mo., a genius at getting a horse ready for one big race, had the look of a man who had fooled even himself. Said little Conn McCreary, who finished fifth aboard Halt: "When the day comes around, he makes you look like a sucker...
...superstitious. The $2 bettor, his nose buried in a Racing Form, usually has a queasy feeling that there are things going on that he wots not of, but that the wise boys wot right well. He is peculiarly sensitive to the great American dread of being played for a sucker. But he still thinks he has a chance?if he can dope some angles...
...showed him the solution, but [the] stooge jumped in and made a long harangue about how right Chiang Kai-shek was. I let them rant." On that first dinner Stilwell had a typical comment: "What a directive-what a mess!" Even more characteristically he exclaimed, "And what a sucker...
...strong fear of rejection, of being treated as unworthy of love; and one technique of dealing with this fear is to anticipate it, by rejecting before one is rejected." The other side of the fear of being rejected is "the fear of being exploited, of being made a sucker of, of not being truly loved for oneself alone but only for what one provides." This, says Author Gorer, is the meanest and one of the most prevalent of American fears. The generosity of Americans, great and ungrudging as it is, is likewise limited by the suspicion that they...