Word: blackamoor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Split Idol. Gage's last major adventure as a missionary was a bold and dramatic episode. With an Indian guide, armed companions and his "blackamoor" bodyguard, he walked into a deserted cave where ancient Indian deities were still worshiped. Coming upon a grim idol and ignoring its scowl, he ordered the idol removed. In church next Sunday, he preached on the text: "Thou shalt not have strange gods before me." At a suitable moment the friar produced the idol and had it chopped to pieces with an ax and burnt. Later the idolaters had Gage cudgeled, stabbed...
...hunt, a concert, or a table-top display of drawing-room conceits. The Hand Kiss is part of a humorous circle of distractions derived from Molière, in which the gallant's daring is brought to nothing by the lady's jealous lap dog and busy blackamoor...
...Mirror. London in Hogarth's age was a smallish city, as statistics go now. It was a place where the procession to the pillory of a popular prostitute (like Moll Hervey, who was set up at the Blackamoor's Head and Sadler's Arms in Hedge Lane) or an unpopular madam (like Mother Needham of Park Place, St. James's) might bring out a bigger crowd than a coronation. Londoners were a people who had yet to regard understatement as a virtue or overdrinking as a vice...
...Sigmund was "born in a caul," i.e., with part of his prenatal envelope still swaddling him, and an old woman, straight out of folklore, turned up to assure the proud mother that she had brought "a great man into the world." A wandering poet confidently predicted that the "little blackamoor" (as mother Freud called her jet-haired "Sigi") would "probably become a [cabinet] minister...