Friendly Skies (1933, 1965); Thrill/Victory (1875); Agony/Defeat (1864)

[Michael Quinion]

Barry Popik wrote:

> FRIENDLY SKIES
> 19 November 1933, NEW YORK TIMES, pg. SM11: A SILENT
> EMPIRE IN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE:  There a visitor found friendly
> skies, flowers and men who thrive amid desolation.

Even isolated from its direct airline associations, it's the sort
of phrase that a writer might occasionally come up with. For
example, Gail Haminton in her "Gala-Days" of 1863:

"And of all beautiful things that could have been thought of or
hoped for, what should come to crown our queen of days but a
thunder-storm, a most real and vivid thunder-storm, marshalling up
from the west its grand, cumulose clouds; black, jagged, bulging
with impatient, prisoned thunder biding their time, sharp and
fierce against the brilliant sky, spreading swiftly over the
heavens, fusing into one great gray pall, dropping a dim curtain of
rain between us and the land, closing down upon us a hollow
hemisphere pierced with shafts of fire and deafening with unseen
thunders, wresting us off from the friendly skies and shores,
wrapping us into an awful solitude."


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>