Word: zoot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Teds' notion of sartorial splendor ranges from a caricature of Edwardian elegance to the zoot padding of a Harlem hepcat. Their hair is elaborately and expensively coiffured in long, wavy styles that range from the "D.A." (for Duck's Arse) to the "TV Roll" and the "Tony Curtis." Their jargon is a mixture of Cockney rhyming slang and U.S. jive talk in which a road is a "frog" (from the phrase frog-and-toad, which rhymes with road), a suit is a "whistle" (from whistle-and-flute), and a girl is a "bird...
...terrified boy of 15 in the presence of his first major opportunity." He would hang for a moment on the microphone, holding it itchily, as if it were a snake. "His face was like a wet rag." His chest caved in, as if from the weight of the enormous zoot shoulders it bore, and a huge, floppy bow tie hung down like the ears of a spaniel. For a moment he would look among his audience, pleadingly, as if searching for his mother, and then he would begin, timidly and with trembling lips, to sing...
...relations between us and the British." Colonel G. F. McGuire, deputy commander of the Britain-based U.S. Third Air Force, ordered airmen of his command to modify their off-duty garb "in accordance with local custom." The only exception: attendance at such ail-American affairs as ball games. There, zoot suits, Harry Truman shirts and other native costumes may still be worn without penalty...
Good Communists have long frowned on the capitalistic, zoot-suited squares who resist the muscular dedication of their People's Republics. They call them variously hooligans, Bikinists (after the big bomb and the little bathing suits) or just plain Schlurfs. Last week a 25-year-old, gun-toting Schlurf named Jan Brzoza was up before a Polish court, charged, along with three accomplices, with robbery. The court decided to make an example of Brzoza and sentenced him to death on the simple grounds that if a Bikinist is not already a traitor he will probably be one before long...
...Senator Joe McCarthy ("the only leader in America today showing strength, character and direction"), but the 800 screaming followers who gathered in the school auditorium to greet Mosley might have been waiting there ever since the late 1930s. There were the same blond bully boys, the same zoot-suited spivs, the same middle-aged women, and the same intellectuals ready to follow any leader raucous enough to give strength to their neuroses. On a table in the corner, there were even the same penny pamphlets, now boosted to tuppence by inflation...