Word: backward
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...Throughout a performance of Lohengrin, two women in the audience held hands and caressed one another while onstage the pure knight sang of his love for the chaste Elsa. At the climax of Tristan und Isolde, one bejeweled lady was so overcome by the intoxicating music that she pitched backward into the laps of the unflappable listeners behind her. Richard Wagner, who caused all the excitement, rested peacefully in his grave behind his villa Wahnfried, buried, in the phrase of one astonished British tourist, "in the backyard, sir, like a dog." Bayreuth has seen everything...
...single table, you sit in the middle, the Queen and I on one side and Nancy and Prince Philip on the other. When the toasts are over, the two of us exit down that table. The footmen pull the chairs back, and the Lord Chamberlain precedes us walking backward. I suddenly saw this tiny figure beside me walking along waving her hand. She's steering him. She said to me, 'You know, we don't get those chairs even, and he could fall over one and hurt himself...
Dickson's words have not only definitions but shapes and structures and quirky personalities. Facetiously, he reminds us, is one of the few words in which all the vowels appear in the proper sequence; duoliteral is one of the even fewer in which they all appear backward. Kinnikinnik, he reports, is not only an Indian smoking mixture of bark and leaves but the longest palindrome among the 450,000 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Cuspidor is the word that James Joyce declared to be the most beautiful in the entire language...
...electorate," he writes, "is an extremely unusual Republican constituency," since it comprises two nontraditionally G.O.P factions: a broad swath of working-class voters as well as the smaller, messianic New Right. Because the deep appeal for the New Right was Reagan's impossible amalgam of "various nostalgias and backward-looking vistas" and "a desire for bold measures," the presidential task of "successfully fulfilling such electoral hopes is likely to be difficult. Hence," Phillips writes, "Reagan's coalition is most probably unstable...
...five minutes into the film/' he says, "the coughing started, and halfway through, people began to talk. This was a sympathetic audience that had turned apathetic. Walt Disney used to tell his people, 'Start with a story, then make the movie.' This time they got it backward." The next morning, through Montgomery's 30 traders and salesmen, James advised his clients to lay off the Disney stock. Wall Street reacted fast. The New York Stock Exchange delayed the opening of Disney stock by 2½ hrs. because of a rush to sell...