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vocabulary
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blue-collar
in a sentence

show 16 more with this conextual meaning
  • Oswald has already put in a hard day of blue-collar labor, and the smell of his body odor wafts through the car.†   (source)
  • …settlers who endured the horrors of the wagon trail to Chinese workers (once called coolies) and Irish laborers during the railroad building of the 1860s, to the Oklahoma dust-bowl refugees immortalized in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, to blue-collar workers pouring into the aerospace and defense industries of World War II and the Cold War, to blacks escaping the segregationist South, to Mexicans willing to pick the crops of agribusiness, to youths yearning for the lives glimpsed in…†   (source)
  • I was a child of privilege, he a sweet blue-collar man.†   (source)
  • Later in the day, handsome young men in blue-collar clothes would ring the bell.†   (source)
  • In the Union army the disparity between comparable groups—professionals and high white-collar occupations on one hand and low white-collar and blue-collar workers on the other—was much less, only about 25 percent.†   (source)
  • She was that misplaced woman who attempted to maintain aristocracy in a primarily blue-collar town.†   (source)
  • There were relatively few full-fledged bars in that part of Flatbush (a puzzlement to me until Nathan pointed out that serious tippling does not rank high among Jewish pastimes), but this bar of ours did do a moderately brisk business, numbering among its predominately blue-collar clientele Irish doormen, Scandinavian cabdrivers, German building superintendents and WASPs of indeterminate status like myself who had somehow strayed into the faubourg.†   (source)
  • Like most blue-collar Baltimoreans, he was a horse player, a $2 bettor placing phone calls to a mysterious and illegal bookie at the far end of a telephone wire.†   (source)
  • Alongside these conflicting norms about the value of blue-collar work existed a massive ignorance about how to achieve white-collar work.†   (source)
  • Even at Roosevelt Elementary—where, thanks to Middletown geography, most people's parents lacked a college education—no one wanted to have a blue-collar career and its promise of a respectable middle-class life.†   (source)
  • The town was located on the banks of the South River, about thirty-five miles northwest of Wilmington and the coast, and at first glance, it seemed no different from the thousands of self-sufficient, blue-collar communities long on pride and history that dotted the South.†   (source)
  • In the final years before his strokes, his old-fashioned spectacles, bushy eyebrows, and deeply lined face made him look more like a retired college professor than the blue-collar worker he had been.†   (source)
  • He left the bar a little past ten, stopped at the corner market for a pack of cigarettes, and drove past the houses in the blue-collar neighborhood where he lived.†   (source)
  • To give him up, to send him off to Corpus Christi as I eked out a comparatively dismal existence in the blue-collar world of central Michigan, was an unthinkable proposition.†   (source)
  • The twoand-one-half-to-one majority for emancipation in my sample also probably overstates the margin in the army as a whole, because proemancipation sentiment was strongest among those groups overrepresented in the sample—officers, and men from professional and white-collar occupations—and underrepresents the less educated soldiers from blue-collar and immigrant backgrounds among whom antiblack and antiemancipation attitudes were strongest.†   (source)
  • Except for the previous year's experience at City College I had spent my childhood in the blue-collar world where there was neither money, leisure, nor stimulus to cultivate an intelligent world view.†   (source)
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