Word: afflictive
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...gift of tongues (just for fun, he dashed off translations of a poem by James Stephens in German, Latin, Norwegian, Italian and French). His view of himself was generally rueful, whether he was commenting on his physical "cowardice" or remarking on his "steely cheerfulness in what does not afflict me personally." He read hugely, but at times with so little discrimination that his head felt full of "pebbles and rubbish and broken matches and lots of glass picked up 'most everywhere.' " When he was losing his eyesight he devoted hours to reading Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but lost patience...
...counts. It asks the reader to share what Lael Tucker Wertenbaker calls her "abstract joy in the quality of his death," after which her "winter-white skin turned quite black and stayed dark for two days." It reports every intimate clinical detail of the pain, distress and hopelessness that afflict the victim of terminal cancer. As such, it tends to force into silence critics who may feel that they have been invited to share a private rite that Lael Tucker created about her dying husband-but who have doubts about its public validity...
...merely give a reassuring "You'll grow out of it," and let it go at that. At the other extreme, dermatologists have tried every conceivable remedy-vitamin A, vaccines, soaps, yeast, antiseptics, astringents, diets, hormones, ultraviolet and X rays, warnings against "picking." Despite such efforts, acne continues to afflict vast numbers of adolescents (variously estimated as 50% to 90%), many with skin-scarring, soul-searing severity...
...excerpt also describes in greater detail than Genesis the terrible plagues that were visited on Pharaoh for taking Sarah. "That night the Most High God sent a pestilential wind to afflict him and all his household, a wind that was evil. And it smote him and all his house and he could not come near her nor did he know her." After two years of this, according to the scroll, not even Sarah's marvelous beauty could sustain the Pharaoh. He restored her to Abraham and sent them both out of Egypt "exceedingly rich in cattle and also...
Wasteful Ways. Today the belly of Paris is badly upset. And the symptoms it suffers from are those that afflict all France-the paralysis of outworn tradition, the plague of overorganized centralization, the jealous persistence in selfish ways. The tradition began in 1134, when King Louis the Fat picked out a quiet meadow on Paris' outskirts for the food marketeers. The meadow has long since been surrounded by the center of burgeoning Paris, but no one has been able to dislodge Les Halles, though it is two miles from the main railroad stations and set in a tortuous network...