take a fall, take a spill, flophouse,vagabond, greying, graying

Key Senator: GM CEO Must Go

Senator Dodd says GM CEO Rick Wagoner should take a fall as part of a Congressional deal to get billions into the hands of the auto companies


By 4:30 a.m., thousands of aging day laborers had spilled out of the neighborhood’s flophouses and homeless shelters, or risen from its parks and streets, to form a potential work force of mostly graying men.

From 1909 to the outbreak of the First World War, Hitler led a wretched existence. For a while he lived in a Vienna "flophouse," among beggars and vagabonds.

dosshouse UK Show phonetics
noun [C] (US flophouse) SLANG
an extremely cheap hotel for poor homeless people in a city
n.
A cheap rundown hotel or boarding house.


vagabond
noun [C] OLD USE OR LITERARY
a person who has no home and usually no job, and who travels from place to place:
They live a vagabond life/existence, travelling around in a caravan.
Compare vagrant.



grey, US USUALLY gray Show phonetics
adjective, noun [C or U]
(of) the colour that is a mixture of black and white, the colour of rain clouds:
a grey sky
She was dressed in grey.

grey, US USUALLY gray Show phonetics
adjective
1 having hair that has become grey or white, usually because of age:
He started to go/turn grey in his mid-forties.

2 describes the weather when there are a lot of clouds and little light:
Night turned into morning, grey and cold.

3 boring and sad:
He saw a grey future stretch ahead of him.

greying, US USUALLY graying Show phonetics
adjective
If a person or their hair is greying, their hair is becoming grey:
He is greying now but still elegant.

greyish, US USUALLY grayish Show phonetics
adjective
slightly grey

greyness, US USUALLY grayness Show phonetics
noun [U]

take a fall

1. Also, take a spill. Suffer a fall, fall down, as in You took quite a fall on the ski slopes, didn't you? or Bill took a spill on the ice.
2. Be arrested or convicted, as in He's taken a fall or two and spent some years in jail. [Slang; 1920s]