Word: tosspot
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ernie Mott's middle name is Verdun, because his tosspot, philandering artist father was killed at Verdun in World War I. Ernie's mother keeps a secondhand furniture store, lends money and receives stolen goods on the side. Ernie is apprentice to a lithographer, is fired for laziness and ineptitude, becomes a hanger-out at the Fun Fair, a penny arcade replete with peep shows, pinball games, shooting gallery and a change girl named Ada -"a proper, right, straight up smasher of a bride" with yellow hair, red fingernails and a close-fitting sweater...
...Tosspot Teetotaler. The Father Mathew to whom the Cardinal Archbishop referred was a whisky-drinking priest turned teetotaler. He has been dead 86 years, but to many a Catholic in Ireland, England, the U.S., the name of the "Apostle of Temperance" is still as green as his native Eire...
...Perelman like many another fledgling writer headed posthaste for Montparnasse. A redoubtable tosspot and coxcomb, he was celebrated throughout the Quarter for drinking Modigliani under the table; his fondness for this potent Italian apéritif still remains unabated. In 1925, disguised as Ashton-Wolfe of the Sûreté, he took to frequenting the milieu, the sinister district centering about the rue de Lappe. As 'Papa' Thernardier, he organized the gang that stole a towel from the Hotel Claridge and defaced the blotters at the American Express Co. A démarche from the Quai...
Monty is an old tosspot actor with a crippled daughter (Ida Lupino) whom he dropped on the floor as an infant and who has been vainly trying to get him sober ever since. Daughter finally accepts a suitor and simultaneously persuades her father to attempt a comeback in King Lear. From there on the plot falls to pieces...
...some 80 years Russian music had been strongly influenced by "The Five"- César Cui, an engineer; Modest Mussorgsky (Boris Godunov), a government clerk and famed tosspot; Alexander Borodin (Prince Igor), a doctor; Nicolas Rimsky-Korsakov, a naval officer; Mily Balakirev, a professional musician. In opposition to the international style of Tchaikovsky, "The Five" believed that the source of Russian music should be Russian-folk songs and church music. Igor Stravinsky (Petrouchka, The Fire Bird) continued this nationalist tradition, though he later abandoned it for severe and arid abstractions...