cry poormouth

present singular third person cries poormouth · participle present crying poormouth · participle past cried poormouth · past cried poormouth

1. informalintransitiveTo claim to be poor, especially in a conspicuous and self-pitying way.

   Don't take her drama too seriously. She's always crying poormouth.

   4 more examples

   The true state of the taxi fleets' finances, a condition that is central to the question of how much more—if anything—the city's 800,000 daily riders should be asked to pay, is a mystery. Were the fleets, which operate 58 per cent of the 11,779 cabs licensed to cruise New York's streets (the rest are jockeyed by independent owner-drivers) really running a $7-million-a-year loss? What happened to all the bread that came out of the 1968 settlement, when the City Council with only one dissenting vote approved an increase in the average fare from $1.05 to $1.35? Were the fleets, privately controlled from behind an impenetrable thicket of at least 2,000 separate corporations—an auditor's nightmare—once again merely crying poormouth?

   1971 January 4, Richard Phalon, “After the cab strike: How was the meter made? The City Politic [column]”, in New York, volume 4, number 1, page 8

   Thus, at the May 12 meeting, testified Medeiros, Chubb had asked if the Union could make any concessions in the contract to keep the restaurant open and if the Union would be willing to afford Respondent Love's "some relief in certain classifications, in health and welfare and so forth." Medeiros, however, testified that he had viewed these comments as no more than a bargaining ploy inasmuch as it had been his experience, based upon past negotiations, that employers, in general, and Chubb, in particular, were "always crying poormouth and they are always trying to whittle something out of the organization and I just take it as a matter—I have been hearing this for thirty something years, I just take it as a matter of—I just take it as a grain of salt, the same old story."

   1981, “Love's Barbeque Restaurant No. 62”, in Decisions and Orders of the National Labor Relations Board, volume 245, United States National Labor Relations Board, page 89

   As for their getting a skim from World Jai Alai, Whitey said that was nonsense. He cried poormouth, saying that he and Flemmi had inherited from their Winter Hill partners a $250,000 gambling debt to the Mafia but were only paying the juice, or interest, of $2,500 a week. If they were getting money from World Jai Alai, Whitey said, they would have paid that debt back in full by now.

   2013, Kevin Cullen, Shelley Murphy, Whitey Bulger: America's Most Wanted Gangster and the Manhunt That Brought Him to Justice, W. W. Norton, →ISBN

   Behind the scenes, trouble was brewing in the Purdy circle, and accusations of impropriety emerged. At a certain juncture, financial data in the files of the Running Sun Theater Company office became known to Dennis Moore, raising concerns and suspicions about John Uecker, who was managing Purdy's affairs. As it turned out, Purdy had a great deal of money in multiple accounts but he always "cried poormouth," as Thomson and Moore said.³⁵ Friends worried over how James ate and paid rent.³⁶ "James was playing me," said Moore, who had mailed the author drawing pads, believing him destitute. Purdy, who sometimes complained he could not pay rent, "acted poor when he had a million dollars."³⁷ Among other expenditures, Moore noticed a pattern of regular $600 withdrawals that eroded Purdy's savings. More than that, millions of dollars "evaporated in about a year's time," Moore claimed, probably an exaggeration. Uecker, disputing Moore's claims and credibility, said that Purdy never had more than $800,000 in the bank.

   2022, Michael Snyder, “The acolytes”, in James Purdy: Life of a Contrarian Writer, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 353

   Synonyms: poormouth