Word: contort
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...appearance, wrote scribes of the era, was "cadaverous," and there was something so supernatural about 19th century Violin Virtuoso Nicolo Paganini "that one looked for a glimpse of a cloven hoof or an angel's wing." Onstage, the maestro would often contort his body into bizarre stances. His tours de force, like playing a pizzicato accompaniment with his left hand while bowing with his right, prompted audiences to whisper that Paganini was in league with the devil. But alas, he was merely mortal, according to an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The violinist, writes...
Talking to Diane Keaton is a bit like playing a record with an unmarked speed: it takes time to get synchronized. At the beginning she will hem and haw, whistle and giggle, mumble and fumble, shrug her shoulders and contort her face. She will start a sentence the way she might climb a tree, worried that the branches will crack or that she will climb too high and not be able to get back down. Gradually, as she gains confidence, the mumbles turn into words, the words into full-and even funny -sentences. "Diane is always totally surprised when people...
...made up their own myths as they went along. Grey, the weazy sycophant behind Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, certainly found his modern counter-parts in the New York film critics crowd, a bunch that seems to want to "Altmanify" the world, and did their damndest to verbally contort this pleasant but rambling work into a masterpiece...
...night, student overseers at all but one of the dances enforce a dress code. Swing and ball-room music dominates at a few affairs. At another semi-formal, students contort themselves to the latest discotheque tunes in a hall so dark that it would have been impossible to distinguish between tuxedos and clean football jerseys. Many at the semi-formal compare the atmosphere to that of the 1920s. "It's the same old song put to different music," one student complains. "Why couldn't I have been here six years ago when Yale and Harvard didn't mean...
Another interesting facet of the Dartmouth team is that its members grow in size as the game wears on. Their faces contort with an incredibly grim determination, and their bodies swell to the point where they are impassible on defense, and unstoppable on offense...