The policy, which has existed for years but intensified in 2009, is designed to prevent crime by identifying suspicious behavior;
skulkers, smirkers, smokers, and other shifty-looking folks attract a friendly greeting and a not-so-friendly pat-down by a representative of the New York Police Department (NYPD).
Fronto's essay on eloquence again starts with discussion of words: their quality, the need to 'double or treble, quadruplicate or multiply even more' the words appropriate to a situation, to extract the most suitable from the total 'word population' and, like a press-gang, to hunt up the '
skulkers' and impel them into service (De Eloq.
And many theatre artists, not to mention readers, surely see critics as a race of batty, blind
skulkers, whose job (as Mark Twain put it) "is the most degraded of all trades."
I phone the lady who organises such things and tell her I saw a couple of
skulkers. "Was one of them wearing an Arthur Daly jacket," she asked?
In the second stanza, the first two lines refute the notion that prisoners of war were cowards or "
skulkers" who allowed themselves to be captured.
[T]he flare-up was the work--let this fact be emphasized--of a few hundred rioters, some of them incited by an outrageous deed, others of them
skulkers in the anarchistic underbrush who urged them on for their own foul purposes of destroying property and paralyzing the arm of the law"
While noting that the Civil War certainly had its share of "
skulkers, sneaks, beats, stragglers, [and] coffee-coolers" who "played off" when the fighting started, McPherson argues persuasively that a critical mass of Civil War soldiers fought for their beliefs (6).
McPherson does not deny the existence of shirkers and
skulkers. But his concern is with those who did fight, and continued to fight, whether enthusiastically or dutifully, until death, defeat, or victory.
(5.) James McPherson notes that 47 percent of his Confederate sample are officers and that he is "less interested in the motives of
skulkers who did their best to avoid combat." For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford Univ.
