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Word: basilisk (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
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Usage:

...white-maned old faker, now head of the Soviet delegation to the U.N., commands a dozen voices, from the sly wheedle to the choleric roar, a dozen expressions, from the impish grin to the basilisk glare. For all his arrogance, he is a much more entertaining performer than Russia's wooden men-Molotov, Malik, Gromyko. He is also a remarkable survivor of 37 years of power struggle in the Kremlin. A onetime Menshevik, he came through unscathed when the Bolsheviks put the Mensheviks out of business in 1921. He not only rode out the great purges...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: RUSSIA: Farewell, Comrade | 5/3/1954 | See Source »

...Marianne Moore is offering her small but fervent public a collected view of her poetic garden. Nothing quite like it has ever been seen before. Through its pleasant paths wander such birds and beasts as the jerboa, the Malay dragon, the pangolin and the plumet basilisk. In one poem she presents "the frilled lizard, the kind with no legs, and the three-horned chameleon . . . that take to flight if you do not." But while the surface of these delicate verses concerns animals, a second look shows that they are about human beings, too-and about such virtues as orderliness, courage...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Poems for the Eye | 12/10/1951 | See Source »

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