Word: tapping
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1940
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...most important diamond mining company. As boss of both ends of Britain's diamond cartel, he always lets his left hand know what his right is doing. When buyers get languid, Sir Ernest's tight little combination turns off the diamond supply like a kitchen tap. The supply: British and Belgian Africa, whose "pipes" (blue clay mines) and alluvial deposits yield 97% of the world's output. The other 3%, including black diamonds, is sifted haphazardly by natives from river alluvium in Brazil...
...hair, his sense of news verged on the occult. He knew bishops and gunmen, politicians and pickpockets, and treated both the great and the sham with the same casual impertinence. His mind was a brimming pool of assorted facts, which he turned on and off like a tap...
Dink Stover protested (before he was tapped) that Tap Day was "ridiculous rigmarole." Twenty years later Richard Storrs Childs, '32 (now publisher of Modern Age Books), also denounced "the Elks in our midst," shortly afterward accepted election to Keys. In 1933 the entire junior class revolted, stayed stubbornly in their rooms on Tap Day. The societies pursued them to their rooms, had no trouble filling their quotas. Next year, Tap Day returned to the campus. This year the Political Union held an unprecedented public debate, resolved (3840-17) that "the influence of the senior societies...
Nevertheless when Tap Day dawned last week, a Dink Stoverish excitement seized Yale's campus. In the News, Chairman Kingman Brewster Jr. scolded: "Just as in the case of the more discreet years, the society question has managed to dislocate life around here to an insane degree. . . . Six o'clock will bring a general sigh of relief and a sudden realization that after all the day of judgment is still a matter for the Gods and not 90 Yale...
Otherwise, Tap Day ran true to form. Absent from Branford Court but eventually bagged by Bones in his room was another critic of the societies, Kingman Brewster's roommate, William Eldred Jackson, son of U. S. Attorney General Robert H. Jackson. Bones also got its Armenian, Newsman Barooyr Zorthian...