Word: corking
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Some non-Japanese flower listeners say that the evening primrose (Oenothera) makes a "snapping" sound when it opens. Seed pods, of course, can be much noisier; on warm September days phlox pods explode with a soft pop. The squirting cucumber (Ecballium) of Southern Europe sounds like a cork leaving a champagne bottle, and the tropical sandbox tree (Hura, crepitans) has an orange-sized capsule which "explodes with a loud report...
...taken lessons from some Renaissance master. But his subjects are a modern nightmare. His women, like modern Madonnas, mourn, eyes shut against the world. A disfigured war hero stares numbly out of his canvas, his blind eye patched with paper money, his chest covered with worthless medals of tin, cork, broken combs, and tiny crutches. Poleo's trees are dead, his earth pocked and parched, his cities mere ruins and rubble. In some paintings, there are no signs of life at all-only tiny ladders down which the human race has fled to escape an atomic...
Frank O'Connor of County Cork is blessed with a rare, enviable talent: he can express serious ideas in blandly humorous, seemingly inconsequential stories. The twelve tart tales in this book create an imaginary world as real, and certainly as relevant, as daily experience itself...
Each hair, say Emmelin & Feldberg, has a flexible bladder at its base. The hair itself is hollow and stiffened with silica. At the tip is a tiny bulb like a cork stuck on the end of a hypodermic needle. When the hair touches a victim, the bulb breaks off, exposing a point so exquisitely sharp that it slips right through the skin. Pressure on the hair shaft squeezes the bladder and injects poison into the victim's tissues. The result: a hot, burning sensation followed by a longer-lasting itching...
...office at Sacramento one day last week, he sat like a defensive halfback behind his sleek, cork-covered desk. Up to the desk came California's Republican Chairman Arthur W. Carlson. In his hands, Carlson carried a framed copy of a resolution, neatly hand-lettered, adopted by the Republican state committee. The resolution asked Earl Warren's permission to line up a Republican convention delegation...