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May 28, 2003

This week's theme
Metallic words used as metaphors

This week's words
goldbrick
silver bullet
brassy
leaden
tin ear

“Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.” ~Emerson
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brassy

adjective:
1. Made of or resembling brass.
2. Resembling the sound of brass instruments.
3. Brazen; bold; impudent.
4. Showy; pretentious.

[From brass, from Middle English bras, from Old English bræs.]

"There was a shot of a muscular, tanned young man playing paddle-ball at the beach. A blaring radio commercial would be heard in the background while one of the sisters was preparing lunch in her apartment. With only a couple of strokes, this depiction of brassy, confident Israel, always in a hurry to live, made the sisters' lives - slow and sad, with death behind them and death in front of them - that much more vivid."
Larry Derfner; What's Up, Doc?; Jerusalem Post (Israel); Apr 16, 1999.

"According to Kewalram Sital, a Hong Kong businessman who makes a hobby of tracking the whereabouts of his countrymen, there are even 4,000 Sindhis - the most nomadic of Indian communities and its brassiest businessmen - in the Canary Islands off the northern cost of Africa."
Rahul Jacob and Meenakshi Ganguly; Entrepreneurs: Overseas Indians Make it Big; Fortune (New York); Nov 15, 1993.

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