Word: swig
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Last week, no longer a warden, Fernand Billa went on trial for "criminal negligence." One of the beneficiaries of his kindness, himself on trial for forging his own passes out of the prison, did his best to help. "Sometimes I gave him a swig of red Bordeaux or a chicken wing," testified the prisoner. "He was my guest, that's all." Billa's lawyer entered an eloquent appeal: "Billa is a pioneer of the new penitentiary doctrine which, so far as possible, would keep the prisoner from any contact with the prison." But all this...
Throughout France's wine areas, many children take a swig every time the jug is passed. In the Vendée, a local health officer asked a farmer's wife why her two infants were flushed and screaming. Explained the mother placidly: "Last night was the Communion supper. They drank one more Triple Sec than usual...
...Suite. Fresh bows to the businessman are now made by Britain's Socialist Novelist J. B. Priestley in The Magicians and the U.S.'s Republican Novelist Howard Swiggett in The Power and the Prize. Priestley's book is suave, but wanders off into drawing-room speculation; Swig-gett's novel is crude, though closer to boardroom politics...
...garrulous others, also, gabbing and garlanded from one nest of culture-vultures to another: people selling the English way of life and condemning the American way as they swig and guzzle through it; people resurrecting the theories of surrealism for the benefit of remote parochial female audiences who did not know it, was dead, not having ever known it had been alive; people talking about Etruscan pots and pans to a bunch of dead pans and wealthy pots in Boston...
...ribs the comrades unmercifully. "Viatcheslav Mikhailovitch," he yelled at Molotov during one gorodki game, "you hold the stick like an old woman with a broom!" Sputtered Molotov: "I'd like to see you try to play gorodki with glasses on!" Watching Budenny, the handle-bar-mustached old cavalryman, swig vodka at dinner, Stalin joshed: "Our Marshal goes through the vodka like Suvarov.* Too bad he doesn't resemble Suvarov in other ways...