Word: blacking
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...word has a different meaning from that which it bears nearly everywhere else, being used to signify a crib, or other unlawful aid used at examinations or recitations. At Bowdoin a crib is known as a fakir, and at Yale it is a skin. The author - Richard Grant Black is his name - makes one or two unimportant mistakes with regard to the few original slang words in use here. Snab for girls, he tells us, is a Harvard word. He may be right, but I think very few undergraduates at present would know what it meant...
...only word we have for voluntarily omitting recitation or chapel, has a number of synonyms. At Columbia they prefer to slope, at Michigan University they bolt, and in some of the western "educational institutions" they skate Mr. Black is unable to find derivations for these words. Slope is to be found in Hotten's Slang Dictionary, meaning "to decamp, run off," and is called an Americanism. Cut is found in the same place, meaning "to stop, cease to do anything...
...costs a greater effort to concede even justice to our conquerors than to be magnanimous to our conquerors than to be magnanimous to our fallen foes. Xerxes would never hear any good of the Athenians; but the Black Prince waited upon King John at table. And I, if I had been victorious in my last encounter with my old enemies, might now play the Black Prince to the Examination System's King John. As it is - but who likes to sing of defeat...
...desire to call attention again to the general practice of scratching matches on the black-walnut finish in the vestibule of Memorial Hall. Were the injury only temporary, a sense of propriety ought to suggest to the student that the use he is making of the building is one far different from that intended by the donors; but when one considers that the marks cannot be effaced, it then becomes a crime thus to disfigure the building. We hope, therefore, that there will be no occasion to refer again to the subject...
...huge black smooches in their place...