Word: chirking
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...Queen Chinee. Eccentricity was first nature to a Sitwell. Edith's potty papa, for instance, tried to chirk up the landscape of his 5,000-acre estate in Derbyshire by painting blue Chinese ideographs on a herd of white cows. "Poor little 'E' " came along, and he decided to redecorate his gangling and disjointed daughter. When she was eleven he fitted her from head to foot with orthopedic braces designed to realign her physique-not omitting a steel clamp that gripped her nose and was "regulated by a lock-and-key system...
That wretched Mrs. Chirk, she had forgotten her name again! Once it had really been Finch, but after what seemed a lifetime of being miscalled "Chirk" in National Health Service waiting rooms "Chirk" stuck. Not for long, though. "Poor soul," says one character about her, "I wonder when she last knew herself." "Probably never," replies another. "One would probably have to go back to her grandfather to find an identity that really made an impression...
Modern mankind is Mrs. Chirk. That is the thesis which British Novelist Nigel Dennis, a contributing editor of TIME brilliantly defends in one of the funniest most penetrating novels since the early Aldous Huxley. Once upon a time (perhaps in grandfather's day), says Author Dennis in effect, a man's Self was his castle. There might be an occasional siege of sin, and the drawbridge to the outer world might get tangled in confusion, but the Self itself stood fast. It was kept in place (like Bishop Berkeley's tree in the quad...
...early Welsh dictionary given by Thomas Hollis and a book of ancient Welsh laws, the "Black Book of Chirk" are the features of the Welsh exhibition. A case of modern Welsh books is also on display. Several Bibles translated into Gaelic especially for the Scots round out the exhibit...
...their cordilIcras lit by the sun setting over the Pacific. But they cannot look at the sun. It hurts their red and puffy eyes which can only peer into shadows for herbs, roots and grains on which to feed. When the dazzling sun disappears for the night, the gnomes chirk up. Pouty lips mumble rusticities into lumpish ears. The males creep forth to forage. The older females brew the night's potage. And gnats skitter across the moonbeams...
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