Word: verb
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Unlike Stalin (né Dyugashvili), Trotsky (né Bronstein) and Molotov (né Scriabin), Zhdanov still has the name he was born with. Sharing a common root with the Russian verb zhdat, to wait or to expect, it is a good name for a man who was to ride quietly up the party escalator until he could expect (or at least hope for) succession to the biggest political job on earth. His father was a school inspector in Tver (now Kalinin), about 100 miles northwest of Moscow. Zhdanov had a better education (including German and French) than any present member...
...Noodle (verb): to play a few bars of background music...
...STIX Nix Hix Fix, when bucolic cinemas' flopped in the hinterland) have attained a kind of backstage immortality. So have flopperoo, push over, palooka, scram, to click; and such trade phrases as "boff" (a variation of sock or punch) for smash hit, "preem," as a verb meaning to stage a premi...
Author Slobodkin has an artist's eye for significant detail and the kind of gossipy fluency that makes many women's letters easy reading. He has also managed to smuggle into print (suitably disguised) a verb seldom seen in polite English prose since Lady Chatterley's Lover. In fact, Slobodkin has assimilated himself so completely to the somewhat rancid life of his crewmates that some readers may feel that they have listened to a five-hour monologue by a seafaring stablehand...
...origin of Yankee floored the editors. The best they could do was to indicate the word's earliest use (1765) and its range of meanings. Thus, a Yankee is an American to a foreigner, a New Englander to an American, and a Northerner to a Southerner; as a verb the word is obsolete slang meaning "to hornswoggle...