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canny
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  • She had everything Somerset Maugham had ever written (once Paul found himself wondering dourly if she had John Fowles's first novel on her shelves and decided it might be better not to ask), and Paul began to work his way through the twenty-odd volumes that comprised Maugham's oeuvre, fascinated by the man's canny grasp of story values.†   (source)
  • She'd seen him sidle up to women in public places to ask some delving question in his blank-faced canny way.†   (source)
  • This was a rather legalistic maneuver, but Phaedrus by this time had developed a kind of combative canniness.†   (source)
  • My wife was on all fours now, racing around the terminal as the frogs cannily stayed one hop ahead of her.†   (source)
  • I think her wise and canny beyond her years.†   (source)
  • I put aside your socialistic vapourings of course—every fellow to his fad—I see in you the makings of a canny business man.†   (source)
  • The ever-canny Pop had negotiated with her work supervisor that she'd be allowed one protected smoke at the end of her shift and a safe hidey-hole in the kitchen.†   (source)
  • "Miss Nah Canny," he says.†   (source)
  • Each time he succeeded in dumping some on the world market for a loss it was snapped up by canny Egyptian brokers in the Levant, who sold it back to him at the original price, so that he was really worse off than before.†   (source)
  • Last Christmas I was really canny—I let my points build up until I'd accumulated enough to buy my granny's Christmas present.†   (source)
  • He's a canny old guy.†   (source)
  • Though he was cannily evasive on personal details, she was gathering information.†   (source)
  • I battled him with all my strength and canniness about the game.†   (source)
  • His face was so bony and gaunt that at times his sallow skin appeared transparent, but his pale blue eyes were sharp and belied a canny stealth and intelligence.†   (source)
  • It's not canny.†   (source)
  • A cannier man might have argued even so, but Junior didn't have it in him and he changed the subject to the bathroom arrangements.†   (source)
  • Atzerodt has a reputation for being dim, but he is canny enough to know that once he threw his knife into a gutter, the only obvious piece of evidence connecting him with the conspiracy was being seen publicly on Booth's horse.†   (source)
  • She'd met him now twice and knew him to be a charming and canny man who made his rather exorbitant living with transportation.†   (source)
  • Cannily, all Randy said was, "If you have Preacher's permission, it's all right with me.†   (source)
  • A close passing look had revealed it to be a Stromberg Carlson, which she assumed to be Swedish until Bronek—a simple-seeming but canny fellow Polish prisoner who worked as a handyman in the Commandant's house and was a chief purveyor of gossip and information—told her it was an American machine, captured from some rich man's joint or foreign embassy to the west and transported here to take its place amid the mountainous tonnage of booty assembled with frenzied mania for pelf from all…†   (source)
  • When all was silent, he smiled a canny smile and spoke in his deepest down-home southern drawl.†   (source)
  • There was a kind of quiet wisdom or canniness there, no doubt of that.†   (source)
  • They figured if he had seen them he was a canny one, but they lay quiet, curious like squirrels.†   (source)
  • "Rebecca, you have the uncanniest knack of hitting the nail right on the head," he says at last.†   (source)
  • The human child—so much cannier at times than the stupefyingly ponderous adult.†   (source)
  • His eyes, so full of fun, seemed to sharpen with a quick, canny focus.†   (source)
  • I developed a canny appetite for all food after that, but an allergy was a different thing.†   (source)
  • Jeb and Doc came last, and I knew Jeb's canny eyes would be on my face.†   (source)
  • "Just dropped by, Mrs. Nah Canny," Mr. Barker shouts.†   (source)
  • Which is why I cannily stopped off at Waterstones on the way home and bought a book on Wagner.†   (source)
  • "Not Nah Canny," I tell him, printing my name on the blackboard: nakane.†   (source)
  • Hello, Naomi—Mrs. Nah Canny," he says, peering in through the doorway.†   (source)
  • Will Mrs. Nah Canny be all right here on her own?†   (source)
  • Sometimes under her old-ladyish way of speaking he thought he detected a secret canniness, as though like a Delphic oracle she said things with hidden meanings, but he could never be sure.†   (source)
  • In the Age of Bronze, when a canny few discovered the science of metallurgy, how long did it take for them to fashion coins, crowns, and swords?†   (source)
  • He gave me a canny look.†   (source)
  • It's just that he's cannier and smarter than he lets on, and in the slippage between what he looks like and what he is, there's a lot of freedom."†   (source)
  • He had the canny self-assurance of an industry maverick, the outsider who tries to roil the works, japing every complacent rule of belief.†   (source)
  • If he wouldn't help her voluntarily, she would poke and prod and use his canny brain without mercy and without a qualm.†   (source)
  • So being a cannier businessman than you might think, Boyle wagered him on who could drink the most whiskey and stay on his feet.†   (source)
  • Birgit had proven herself canny and strong, and her son, Nolfavrell, had already killed a soldier in combat, despite his tender age.†   (source)
  • Pig and I followed Mark's example instinctively and with a certain pride in the thoroughness of our roommate's canniness under pressure.†   (source)
  • This time she was cannier.†   (source)
  • Icy and canny, she would listen to what he had to say and wouldn't declare herself.†   (source)
  • Cheez, I'd go dere ev'y day if me a'nt owned a canny staw!"†   (source)
  • She watched the tides of traffic cannily; she knew by what corners the largest number of people passed in a day or an hour; she was sensitive to every growing-pain of the young town, gauging from year to year its growth in any direction, and deducing the probable direction of its future expansion.†   (source)
  • Among these came the sheriff of the county--a fat, comfortable man with a hard, canny head and a benevolent aspect--who thrust away those who crowded to look down at the body on the sheet with that static and childlike amaze with which adults contemplate their own inescapable portraits.†   (source)
  • Is she got a reggiler big canny staw?†   (source)
  • "You must go on and find out all about that light, and what it is for, and if all is perfectly safe and canny," said Thorin to the hobbit.†   (source)
  • Hoots, but they're na canny.†   (source)
  • Eugene writhed to hear his fierce condor prattle this stale hash of the canny millionaires, like any obedient parrot in a teller's cage.†   (source)
  • And more quietly, soberly, in this crowd, moved the older thriftier workmen: the true carpenters, the true masons, the true mechanics— the canny Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, the fishermen of the Virginia coast, the careful peasantry of the Middle-West, who had come to earn, to save, to profit from the war.†   (source)
  • In politics and religion this Sane Citizen is the canniest man on earth; and in the arts he invariably has a natural taste which makes him pick out the best, every time.†   (source)
  • One touch of regret—not the canny substitute but the true regret from the heart—would have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.†   (source)
  • It's no canny to run frae London to the Black Sea wi' a wind ahint ye, as though the Deil himself were blawin' on yer sail for his ain purpose.†   (source)
  • He is a steady lad,' your father said, 'and a canny goer; and I doubt not he will come safe, and be well lived where he goes.'†   (source)
  • A colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini was not exactly a canny experience, or at the least led into uncharted and dangerous regions; and if we can speak of Hans Castorp's sympathy with the vast winter wilderness, it is because he found it to be, notwithstanding the devout awe it awakened, a suitable arena where he could resolve his tangle of ideas, a convenient spot for someone who, without knowing quite how it had happened, found himself burdened with the duties of "playing king" in…†   (source)
  • "I suppose maybe I'm kind of out of sorts to-night, but honest, honey, when I stayed away for a while to catch up on work and everything and figure out where I was at, you ought to have been cannier and waited till I came back.†   (source)
  • "There are whiles," said he, "when ye are altogether too canny and Whiggish to be company for a gentleman like me; but there come other whiles when ye show yoursel' a mettle spark; and it's then, David, that I love ye like a brother."†   (source)
  • But his superstition united with his canniness played the Count's game for him, and he ran with his favouring wind through fogs and all till he brought up blindfold at Galatz.†   (source)
  • That's what I want cannily to prevent.†   (source)
  • We shall get you off cannily, Dick: and it will be better, both for your sake, and for that of the poor creature in yonder.†   (source)
  • ------------_ SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ROBERT LONG, WILLIS ELLERY, NATHAN COLEMAN, WALTER CANNY, SETH MACY, AND SAMUEL GLEIG, Forming one of the boats' crews OF THE SHIP ELIZA Who were towed out of sight by a Whale, On the Off-shore Ground in the PACIFIC, December 31st, 1839.†   (source)
  • Aias the runner, son of Oileus, at once came forward; then that canny man, Odysseus, and then Nestor's son, Antilokhos, fastest man of them all among the young.†   (source)
  • "But I'd rather take my time over it—I'm a slow and canny man by nature, d'ye see.†   (source)
  • Oh, but now
    my heart quakes with fear that all the Ithacans
    will come down on us in a pack, at any time,
    and rush the alarm through every island town!"
    "There's nothing to fear," his canny son replied,
    "put it from your mind.†   (source)
  • …boy, I must be off, to see to the pigs
    and the whole farm—your living, mine as well.
    You're the one to tend to all things here.
    Look out for your own skin first,

    do take care, you mustn't come to grief.
    Crowds of your own countrymen plot your death—
    let Zeus wipe out the lot before they kill us all!"
    "Right you are, old friend," the canny prince replied.
    "Now off you go, once you've had your supper.
    But come back bright and early,
    bring some good sound boars for slaughter.†   (source)
  • Tell your father,
    flushed with victory, not to kill me with his sword—
    enraged as he is with these young lords who bled
    his palace white and showed you no respect,
    the reckless fools!"
    Breaking into a smile
    the canny Odysseus reassured him, "Courage!
    The prince has pulled you through, he's saved you now

    so you can take it to heart and tell the next man too:
    clearly doing good puts doing bad to shame.
    Now leave the palace, go and sit outside—
    out in the courtyard, clear of…†   (source)
  • Servants miss it,
    terribly, gossiping back and forth with the mistress,
    gathering scraps of news, a snack and a cup or two,
    then taking home to the fields some little gift.
    It never fails to cheer a servant's heart."
    "Imagine that," his canny master said,
    "you must have been just a little fellow, Eumaeus,
    when you were swept so far from home and parents.
    Come, tell me the whole story, truly too.
    Was your city sacked?†   (source)
  • Ca' canny.†   (source)
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