Word: wisp
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Frank Moulan, as the Executioner, is even cleverer, if less Gilbertian. A wizened-eyed little wisp of a man, he capers about constantly, kicking up such a breeze with his furious fanning that he all but blows himself into the wings. He takes frequent encores by singing the most irreverent variations on the text, translating "The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring, Tra-La" into every dialect but the Scandinavian. He expands the patter-song "I've Got a Little List" to include the more recent nuisances. Even in Gilbert's day this song was progressively altered to include...
...summer day in 1925 dexterous Dr. Serge Voronoff had on his operating table a frail, weazened wisp of a woman. She was only 68 but German Reds hailed her as "The Grandmother of our Revolution!'' Years of bitter struggle had aged Frau Clara Zetkin before her time. She needed "rejuvenation." Dr. Voronoff did his best, grafted in bits of ovarian tissue, pronounced his operation "successful...
...chin, "They got big guns, hey? Twelve inches! Some big guns! We only got little guns, so." The washer of the linen demonstrated the size of the Chinese guns with his hands, leaving the iron to rest on a shirt, but his gesticulation were cut short by a thin wisp of smoke arising from the offended garment. Wing seemed in the best of spirits after this demonstration of his ironing ability, and went on to observe, "We're going to build airplanes, a thousand airplanes, ten thousand airplanes, and we'll go over their big cities and rain bombs...
...magic key to success has permeated every rank of society. Should such an attraction be introduced into an inexpensive school like the Massachusetts College there is grave danger that men who would otherwise have pursued a thoroughly useful technical course will be lured by the cultural will o' wisp to forsake their original purpose...
...vast and draughty triangle nearly three times the size of Newfoundland. It contains many a lake. The eider duck and the hair seal are disappearing, but on the word of Medical Missionary Sir Wilfred Thomason Grenfell, the country is infested with mice "of many varieties." A will-of-the-wisp to Labrador explorers and Labrador investors are the perennial stories of a great-unexploited gold field somewhere up the Hamilton River...