Word: cumbrous
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...White collection includes a superb variety of masks, from cumbrous affairs that need an athlete to lift them to a wooden Ogoni mask from Nigeria, with its curving protrusion of lips like a bird's beak, too small to fit a human head. Thompson has included films showing how these personifications of spirit and moral forces are used in communal dances: Gaa Wree-Wre, for instance, the Dan personification of "ideal justice," with its white-rimmed eyes, worn in a dance characterized by ponderous walking and sitting...
...working on the construction of Villa Cricoli near Vicenza, its owner took him under his wing. Giangiorgio Trissino, a wealthy humanist with a special interest in architecture, renamed his protégé Palladio, after an Angel of Architecture who appeared in one of Trissino's own cumbrous poems. He took the young man on several journeys to Rome. There, awed by the half-buried ruins, Palladio began the long work of measurement, analysis and drawing that would turn him into the leading architectural theorist of his age. The result was Palladio's Four Books of Architecture, which...
...fault is partly in the cumbrous plot. After a TV giveaway marriage, Myrtle (Lynn Redgrave) and Jeb (James Coburn) find themselves hostile strangers. Winded, impotent, pulling marijuana smoke into a cancerous lung, Jeb courts death instead of his bride. In a Louisiana mansion as corroded as he is, Jeb introduces Myrtle to his half-brother Chicken (Robert Hooks). From the newlyweds' point of view, Chicken has several drawbacks: he is surly, he is vengeful and he is black?"a mistake" claims Jeb, "of my father's." Like two halves of the same soul, the siblings are rivals for the property...
...building. He is immensely sensitive to the needs of the users of a building, and he constantly sees a building as part of a larger social environment. I think what you will get from Mr. Andrews is the kind of approach that Mr. Yelton describes without the cumbrous committee structure that, in all likelihood, would simply result in a consensus of mediocrity. Claude T. Bissell President University of Toronto
...only cumbrous thing about this novel is the title, borrowed from some lines by W. H. Auden. Otherwise, Balloons Are Available is lighter than air and easily dirigible toward its comic purpose. The hero, who progresses from repairman to executive vice president, is named Howard Ormsby. Part Candide, part Buster Keaton, he is loosed in a land where every pratfall is followed by a commercial. Author Crittenden's best effects are gained through a sort of contrapuntal dialogue. One of Howard's loves tells him the story of her life, including the part about her older brother...