Word: croaking
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...hopping holiday to the mountains of Transylvania. The mountain forests were aswarm with wolves and wildcats, so the mother frog warned her children to keep quiet. Her youngest son defiantly boasted, "I am proud to be a frog, and it is in the nature of a frog to croak." He hopped off one day to the bank of a pond and croaked so loudly and so long that a mountain goat spotted him and killed him. "I told him not to croak," the mother frog mourned. "Do not scold your dead son," said the father. "He had the courage...
...various possible meanings of that story are the essence of an odd but ingratiating "documentary" novel called The Frog Who Dared to Croak (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 182 pages; $11.95). The author, as odd and ingratiating as his book, is Richard Sennett, 39, better known as an omnivorously brilliant professor of sociology at New York University. Sennett's hero, Tiber Grau, finds the folktale version of the frog story "pessimistic" and "not entirely clear." Grau is at this point a propaganda official in the short-lived Hungarian revolutionary regime of 1919, so he has the authority to rewrite the nation...
...Olympics. During the Hungarian revolt of 1956, finally, Grau becomes one of six Hungarians designated to negotiate with the Soviets, and instead of appealing for freedom, he argues that Hungary, like the frog, is too small and weak either to fight or to be independent. For this futile croak, the aged survivor is expelled from the Communist Party. "Yet, miraculously, I am still alive and well," says the last of his posthumous papers...
...orchestras. It still terrifies me, but I'm going to force myself to do it. Because I think it's one of the nice things about middle age that you know that even if it's a disaster, you don't have to kill yourself." Croak...
What a charming spot for a renaissance of old values. There are little green islands on the lake. An elegant white house sits at the base of a rock cliff on the western shore. In the evening, frogs croak, crickets chirp, and the freight trains of the Canadian National Railway clatter by on the way to Montreal, the loonlike hoot of the locomotive echoing in the woods as if rushing back in time...