Word: usurper
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Last week Pastor Powell called a church meeting, ordered Brother Skerritt to attend. Declaring that the pastor was trying to usurp the prerogatives of the Friendly Society, Brother Skerritt boldly stayed away. The meeting took place, the church officers declared Brother Skerritt deposed, but still no one could lay hands on those books. Harlem street corners continued buzzing about what each side planned to do next, but all "Reverent"' Powell would say was: "We are only having a family fight, which happens in all families, and we are trying to settle the fight without telling the world about...
...Government is determined that no person or group of persons shall usurp the functions of the State," declared Sir John, referring to the Mosley blackshirts who seized hecklers at Olympia with policemanly vigor and threw them outside to be arrested by Sir John's Bobbies. Later he said: "The Government has decided that alterations in the law shall be made to give uniformed policemen the right to attend any meeting at which they have reason to anticipate disorder...
...Have organized safari and got small bull elephant; all well." In the Davison marksmanship there was no clue to identify the killer-both are excellent shots-nor in their respective degrees of bloodthirstiness. Before President Davison sailed, commissioned by his curators to include four elephants (small enough not to usurp too much space in the exhibit) among his trophies, he said: "I haven't the slightest desire to shoot an elephant" (TIME, June 19). And a long letter received last week from Mrs. Davison by her mother-in-law closed with the words: "I really feel badly about shooting...
...Sanhedrim that draws up Boston social lists reaches out long pseudopodia to Cambridge, absorbing whatever it wants in the ways of male sustenance, and rejecting the rest. So the young roam through their pleasures and palaces quite separately from the old, and it is the young who usually usurp the front pages of the society sections. Relegation of the middle-aged, and increased respect for the goings-on at deb parties have been common to all societies for many years now, but nowhere so boldly as in Boston. In New York the opening of the opera still recalls...
Under such unfavorable circumstances, the prospective tutor might easily degenerate into an assistant in cramming, and usurp the function of the two or three "grinds" which fraternities annually chose for strictly pragmatic purposes. Such an outcome would be a travesty on the genuine tutorial system...