Word: chimp
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cohn's companion on his frail ark: a talking chimpanzee named Buz, after "one of the descendants of Nahor, the brother of Abraham the Patriarch." Granted that Cohn, a former rabbinical student, is given to excesses in biblical name giving, his choice of Buz is scarcely apposite; the chimp is a Christian convert who crosses himself when Cohn reads to him from the Book of Genesis...
Somewhere in this jungle fantasy is no doubt concealed an allegory of the Jews' well-known didacticism and their penchant for social justice. More obscure is the significance of Cohn's coupling with Mary Madelyn (the chimp pronunciation of Mary Magdalene), the island's unique female, a chimp who quotes from Romeo and Juliet with a lisp ("What wov can do, that dares wov attempt"). The fact that only Cohn and Mary Madelyn have sex, producing a baby, causes the beasts to go amuck. In a lunatic re-enactment of both Abraham's intended sacrifice...
...raising dinner in Los Angeles, the President got a partisan laugh by joking, "Believe me, Bedtime for Bonzo made more sense than what they were doing in Washington." The reference, of course, was to a 1951 movie in which Ronald Reagan played a professor who tried to educate a chimp. The wisecrack was part of an attack on congressional Democrats, and as such was a bit unfair since Reagan is partly to blame for the present budget confusion. Back in February, he offered Congress a budget containing increases in military spending so large, cuts in social outlays so drastic...
...could forget "The Great Wilno," a leather-clad stuntman who in 1929 was shot out of a cannon over the heads of startled spectators. Or the drenching downpours of 1939, or the clear, crisp days that came to be known as "Leahy's Luck." Or even Cheetah the chimp, who ate hot dogs, swilled soda and adjusted her sunglasses in 1968. Says Vivian Husted, 75, a handsome, white-haired woman from neighboring Oxford who has been showing her sheep for over 35 years, "I wouldn't want to try to replace this. I'd rather just give...
...noted in the work with Nim. There were rarely any "spontaneous" utterances, and what had seemed at first glance to be original sentences now emerged as responses to questions, imitations of signs made by the teacher, or as rote-like repetitions of memorized combinations. For instance, when Lana, a chimp at Yerkes, said Pleas machine give apple, the first three words seemed to mean nothing more to her than a mechanical prelude to obtaining something she wanted. Says Terrace in his 1979 book Nim (Knopf; $15): "The closer I looked, the more I regarded the many reported instances of language...