Word: swagger.
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Poop Deck. In Toronto, Clifford Nesbitt staggered while undergoing an intoxication test for drunken driving, won an acquittal when he explained: "I'm an ex-sailor. That's my swagger left over from naval days...
...generally takes swagger to get quick glory, even in art, and Bonnard had none. Born bourgeois in 1867, Bonnard studied law to please his father, and art to please himself. Gauguin inspired him to switch permanently to painting. He found a model named Marthe who suited him, and bundled her south to the Midi. They finally set up housekeeping in a little villa at Le Cannet overlooking terraced olive and almond groves with the Mediterranean beyond. Sea, fruit, sunshine, the glow of Marthe's flesh, the dark contrasting sheen of their dachshund, flowers, the trees and the soft airs...
...have never seen another place where a sheriff could swagger around the polls advising voters: "I don't give a goddam who you vote fer-I'm gonna be your sher'f." And anyone who went fishing in Wallins Creek after an election was more likely to hook a ballot box than a fish...
...teen-age gangs who swagger about New York's West Side-in the standard uniform of leather jacket, ducktail hairdo and handy switchblade-like to boast that they are the Egyptian Dragons or the Assassins and that they can lick anybody on the street. But they can thank their geography that they have never had a rumble with a gang from the Far East...
Against this swagger-stick arrogance, Hearn can offer only a hesitant humanism, an instinctive revulsion against the general's icy formula. "How do you calculate," Hearn muses, "whether it's better if some of them get killed and the others get home sooner, or whether they all stay here but go to pot wondering if their wives are cheating on them? How do you tot something like that up?" Replies the general: "I don't concern myself with that...