Word: whack
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ball. His chief aim is to knock down the batsman's wicket (see chart) for an out. The batsman, who defends the wicket, seldom tries to swat the ball out of the park (though over the fence, "a boundary," is an automatic six runs). He hopes to whack out a low grasscutter, since a ball caught on the fly is out. If he thinks he can make it, he runs for the other wicket (66 feet away) and a teammate, ready at the other wicket, trades places. Every time they change places successfully, they have scored...
...Washington studio, the décor is pinball-palace modern, badly beat up. The carpet is worn through, the stained orange velveteen seats are mostly out of whack. Cigaret butts smaller than a little fingernail mat the floor, and through the thick smoke appear big wall signs: "No Smoking." No self-respecting Frenchman would let such a challenge pass, and almost everybody (except babes in arms, of whom there were several) puffs away industriously...
Laugh, Clown, Laugh. "It is ... the particular function of comedy to destroy the more trifling dignities of this earth: quality varies with the shape and size of the dignities it destroys. Pantomime goes with a whack to the seat of the pants; slapstick goes with peel or pie to any section of the anatomy which presents itself; Shaw, a Mack Sennett of the Parlour, trips up the prejudices. The quality deepens till, in Swift, you tumble up the human race itself...
Then the "dead" father turns up, the mere bandaged victim of a whack on the head; and Christy sinks from a hero to a butt. To regain his stature, he tries to murder his "da" all over again; but to Pegeen, a dirty squabble in her own backyard is something quite unlike derring-do at a distance. She scorns to marry Christy; and he, now bossing his father as fiercely as his father once bossed him, sets off with the old man, from Ireland's "Western World," for home...
...knew as well as any Republican that the Democrats did not have a prayer to win New York state unless they could pile up a huge majority in heavily Jewish New York City. Through the political grapevine, the President also knew that Tom Dewey was going to take a whack at Democratic handling of the Palestine question...