Word: coot
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...elected, but by voters who usually have no idea whom they are voting for. Federal judges are appointed for life; they can be removed only by a two-thirds vote of the Senate, and so far only four have been so punished (the last in 1936). One despotic old coot, Judge Willis Ritter of Utah, was allowed to stay on the bench, despite his erratic behavior and abusive temper (he even threatened workmen with contempt for making too much noise near the courtroom), until he died at 79 last year...
...Fonsia into what turns out to be almost a blood sport on the assumption that she is a neophyte. That proves to be a delusion. Over a period of weeks, she wins every game except one that she throws to calm his rising choler. Weller is a cantankerous old coot to begin with, and his blasphemies, obscenities and fit-to-be-tied rages deeply frighten and unnerve Fonsia...
...cowboys, stunt men in the employ of a poverty-row outfit called Tumbleweed Productions, give Lewis a lift to Hollywood and set him down on his own. He picks up a little work as an extra, hangs around the Tumbleweed offices, gets tight with a grizzled old coot named Howard Pike (Andy Griffith), has a shot at being a cowboy star himself, meets a girl (Blythe Banner), works on his novel, and tries to stay away from the two con men who have tracked him all the way to L.A., looking for their strongbox...
...seeing" being "the pearl of great price," modestly insisting, "I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood." Here is no gentle romantic twirling a buttercup, no graceful inscriber of 365 inspirational prose poems. As she guides the attention to a muskrat, to a monarch butterfly, a heron or a coot, Miss Dillard is stalking the reader as surely as any predator stalks its game...
...Morris' characters now seem to coalesce in the splendid single person of a wiry old coot named Floyd Warner. He is the hero of the author's latest novel, a terse, bright fable with all the Morris trademarks-the oblique wit, the offhand revelation, the unfailing eye for what Wallace Stevens called "the real that wrenches, the quick that's wry." Stubbornly out of touch with this or any other time, living in exile in a California trailer court, Floyd has got up to the age of 82 on a diet of hard-fried eggs and potatoes...