Word: clunk
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes--you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk...
...stranger pieces of unsecured U.S. diplomatic baggage fell out of the State Department's closet with a clunk last week. A spokesman announced that the Reagan Administration at long last would seek Senate ratification of a United Nations pact denouncing genocide. The move came less than three weeks before the Senate's scheduled adjournment, making formal consent to the document this session virtually impossible. Stranger still, the Administration's sudden backing occurred after 3½ years of silence about the treaty, which has been supported by Reagan's seven immediate predecessors despite its languishing among...
...sober light of morning, the boys began to wish they had never tried their puckish prank. Whenever Per put his rucksack down, the arm inside made such a resounding clunk that his companions took to teasing him. Per, they said, must be the vandal who had alarmed the city's police force. And so that very night, the sheepish boys aroused a drowsy policeman and placed the severed limb before him. Before Per and Mike can live happily ever after, they may have to pay for the mermaid's repair. And that is likely to cost them...
Last words are supposed to be a drama of truth-telling, of nothing left to hide, nothing more to lose. Why, then, do they so often have that clunk of the bogus about them? Possibly because the majority of them may have been composed by others - keepers of the flame, hagiologists, busybodies...
...verdict was manslaughter. Abbott had been acting, the jury decided, under "extreme emotional disturbance." Sentencing comes next month. A judge of Solomonic gifts might condemn Abbott and Mailer to be shackled together with molybdenum chains, inseparable ever after, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones, to clunk, snarling, from one literary dinner party to another...