Word: whirred
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Slot machines now clank in remote service stations. There are few towns so small that a housewife cannot take a pass at the dice for a dime. In Las Vegas and Reno, divorcees, cowhands, tourists and plain citizens crowd plush palaces where roulette wheels whir and stacked silver dollars gleam on green tables. Gamblers are Nevada's new bonanza kings. Wilbur ("Little Caesar") Clark, 37-year-old operator of Las Vegas' gaudy new Monte Carlo Casino, had only $2,200 in 1941. Now he owns a gambling palace, a hotel, four cocktail bars and two cardrooms; is part...
...focal character of most Thurber-prose and drawings is a reticent, befuddled, thwarted little man who tries sadly to preserve himself and his reason against a practically worldwide onslaught. Grim psychiatrists, gadgets that "whir and whine and whiz," erratic servants, domineering women, unfriendly dogs, ghosts, foreigners -all are in league to crush the Thurber Male. This harried biped, like Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Mann's Hans Castorp, represents 20th-century Man. To Thurber's devotees, who rate him the greatest U.S. humorist since Mark Twain, his blankly exaggerated reports of their own qualms and misadventures...
...monsoon. The open-air season at Manhattan's Lewisohn Stadium had piled up the largest deficit in the orchestra's 25-year history, most of which is written in red ink. Dimmed out as an air-raid precaution, the outdoor stadium had been plagued nightly by the whir of airplane motors. A bolt of lightning had demolished the sound shell on the stadium stage. The final concert had ended in a steady drizzle of rain, with seven violinists sadly sticking to their posts and moistly fiddling Auld Lang Syne. There was not a dry aisle in the amphitheater...
...morning the small fry would come bouncing into bedrooms, shouting Merry Christmas and itching to dive at the filled-up stockings, the boxes under the trees. Soon whole families, in bathrobes and dressing gowns, would be engulfed by billows of wrapping paper, the whir of toy trains, the squeals of genuine or counterfeit surprise...
Washington was hot enough to drive a man crazy. The nerves of Representative Frank Whelchel of Gainesville, Ga. were on edge. Just to make things worse, from the room below his office in the Old House Office Building came the incessant bump and whir of mimeograph machines. Mr. Whelchel had complained about the noise more than once. In his soft Georgia accent he had told Truman Ward, who has a concession to duplicate speeches for Democrats, that one day he would "smash the machines to pieces...