Word: touche
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Washington department stores, helping along an increase in the sale of ladies' fans (50? to $50), distributed an instruction booklet on fan language-"a language more eloquent than words, more revealing than a kiss." Excerpts: "Touch your lips with the fan to attract a kissing man." "I must see you alone (drop fan)." "You are too bold (unfurl fan quickly...
Last week even his best-intended gestures somehow lacked the sure touch, and at least one had an odd consequence. Though the President could hardly be blamed for Senate failure to push through the anti-poll tax bill,* 2,000 Progressive Party members, led by Communist-line Singer Paul Robeson, picketed the White House last week in a protest demonstration...
Being well coached, he never caused an "incident"; he learned to touch his cap and be deferential to white people. He used the "for colored" entrances at stations, drank out of Jim Crow fountains, sat in Jim Crow parks and rode Jim Crow taxis, saw (and resented) many a town's Jim Crow honor rolls of war dead. In Georgia he found that even the Atlantic Ocean was Jim Crow, without "a single foot where a Negro can stick a toe in salt water...
...course of an apparent burglary, by the local police.) His business associates are so young and fearsome that among them Mr. Stevens, no pantywaist, seems as mild and conspicuous as a country uncle. He makes himself still more conspicuous by the recklessly amateurish ways he keeps in touch with fellow agents; they signal each other, for instance, with lights at fleabag windows. However, he stirs up a lot of dirt (a high police official is involved), gets the necessary evidence, and funnels the picture into a climax in a dark factory, where a satisfying portion of hell breaks loose...
...Author. "Today," wrote Graham Greene shortly before World War II, "our world seems particularly susceptible to brutality. There is a touch of nostalgia in the pleasure we take in gangster novels, in characters who have so agreeably simplified their emotions that they have begun living again at a level below the cerebral. We, like Wordsworth, are living after a war and a revolution, and those half-castes fighting with bombs between the cliffs of skyscrapers seem more likely than we to be aware of Proteus rising from the sea. It is not, of course, that one wishes to stay forever...