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Word: tosspot (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
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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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Cockney Dubliner | 10/4/1943 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Religion: Catholic Drys | 8/30/1943 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: It Is Written | 2/1/1943 | See Source »

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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Cinema: The New Pictures, Dec. 21, 1942 | 12/21/1942 | See Source »

...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...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: Shostakovich & the Guns | 7/20/1942 | See Source »

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