Word: whist
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...sample of etymologist Eric Partridge's "vulgar dictionary" contained the commonest four-letter words, but they were masked with asterisks. The fun came in definitions of such obscure but piquant phrases as Back Gammon Player, Brother of the Gusset, Fire Ship, Irish Whist, Nogging House, Pushing School, Scotch Warming Pan and Whiffles. I suppose they might have raised a giggle from the youth of Olde England or 60s Middle America, but kids of the latter era were getting naughtier word play from Ian Fleming. Remember Pussy Galore...
...astonished, amused and terrified the world. For example, he writes, just a generation after topknotted samurai pleaded with U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry to take his "black ships of evil" back where they came from, Japanese statesmen in tailcoats were cheerfully entertaining Western diplomats with rounds of whisky and whist...
Buckwheat and I were playing bid whist with Charlie Chan and the Frito Bandito at the Home for Retired Racial Stereotypes in Hollywood last week when the Kingfish rushed...
...never forget the last night of Jesse Jackson's mission to free U.S. Navy flyer Robert Goodman from captivity in Syria. Another reporter and I were in Jackson's hotel suite in Damascus, beating the reverend and one of his buddies at bid whist, a homeboy version of bridge. But when it was Jackson's turn to deal, he rolled his eyes toward heaven, mumbled something under his breath, and dealt himself a "Boston"--meaning that he won all the tricks. He was still gloating over his luck a few minutes later when Syria's Foreign Minister telephoned with word...
Among these segregated but proud institutions was the elementary school where generations received the sort of rigorous education that inner-city blacks today can hardly imagine. Another was the separate-but-more-than-equal "colored picnic," where blacks who worked at the paper mill gathered to dance, play bid whist and gorge themselves on soul food. Small wonder, as Gates writes, that for many of his parents' generation, "integration was experienced as a loss . . . Who in his right mind would want to go to the mill picnic with the white folks when it meant shutting the colored one down...