Sunday, August 19, 2012

Oar

oar
noun. A pole with a flat blade used to row or steer a boat through water.
verb, transitive. Row or propel with or as with oars. Move something, especially the hands, like oars.

She glanced toward the overhead door. “Oh, no,” she murmured, then looked down at her clipboard again. Josh looked at the opening in turn, just in time to see the company president oar his way through the plastic strips that hung across the opening and pause, glaring at the workers who were stationed here and there in the vast space.

“Mrs. Anderson,” the president stated.

Josh’s companion sighed, lowered her clipboard, and approached the suit-clad man, who had not moved from his position. It was one of the ways he exercised power, Josh decided: summoning an employee to him instead of walking to her and starting a conversation while she continued what she was doing. By interrupting her work, he made her life a little more unpleasant than it would be if he had stayed in his office and issued a memo. Josh guessed that the executive was one of those people who can’t feel good unless he impacts another person’s life in some way--usually for the worse.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.

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