Word: balaams
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book The Key to Heaven and Conversations with the Devil, Kolakowski brings dialectical reason and Marxist exegesis to bear on such unsuspecting material as the ass of Balaam, the quarrel over Job, and Martin Luther's argument with the devil in the bathroom mirror. Ostensibly a hodge-podge of theological quibbles, the book sews its cases in point together with the strong thread of a sophisticated socialist ethics, and a delightful sense of both the fun and sometimes the necessity of playing havoc with the party line...
Joan of the Angels? (Film Polski; Telepix) is a beautiful, full-bodied young woman possessed by eight demons. Almost proudly, she rattles off their names-Balaam, Isacaaron, Behemoth, Gressil, Dog's Tail, Amon, Leviathan, and Asmodeus, demon of lust. Asmodeus, of course, possesses many women. But Joan (Lucyna Winnicka) is no common wench: she is the mother superior in a Roman Catholic convent of Ursuline nuns...
...completed his titanic Les Miserables, as well as other novels. By night he seduced the flower of Guernsey's chambermaids and, in table-tapping seances, had long discussions with "Moliere, Shakespeare, Anacreon, Dante, Racine, Marat, Charlotte Corday, Latude, Mahomet, Jesus Christ, Plato, Isaiah . . . the Dove of the Ark, Balaam's Ass." All these apparitions agreed that Hugo was acting for the best; many spoke in excellent Hugo-istic verse. Lord Byron, however, insisted on speaking English...
...Like Balaam, the leader hadn't started out that way. A fortnight ago, Rival Editor Cummings had given the Beaverbrook press a resounding thwack. "The Daily Express," he wrote in his News Chronicle column, "seems to have the British Empire on the brain ... It opposes Marshall aid and Western Union as policies inimical to the Empire [and] keeps up its dreary drip of criticism unfortified by any rational alternatives...
...eyebrows of newspaper editors, the greatest pedants going, shot up. It was, said the New York Times stiffly, a "remarkable sentence." But college professors, quickly appealed to, proved as disappointing as Balaam. To a man, they put their O.K. on Churchill's grammar-defying "This is me" (a usage that H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, has already admitted to "conversational respectability, even among rather careful speakers of English"). Said Yale's Robert D. French: men like Churchill make the English language. Seconded Princeton's Gordon H. Gerould: idiomatic English is good speech, prissy English...