Word: frailer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Pack of Janitors. 1957's S.F. rests on a much frailer human base. Most of its stories explore the fantastic world of outer space with characters of a type unknown today-inhuman humans subject to telepathy, telekinesis, multiple personality, and an infinite capacity for shifting to and fro in spacetime. As characters, they are deader than the planets they visit; as explorers, they are about as intrepid as a pack of apartment-house janitors. Samples...
Dickens is dead-and who cares? Dickens was an old-fashioned sentimentalist who roared with laughter at his own comic caricatures and wept buckets over his pathetic children and heroines whiter (and frailer) than the driven snow. But Dickens had gusto. So did Mark Twain; so did Kipling; so did H. G. Wells...
...central Czechoslovakia is a 17th century fortress with walls 39 feet thick. There last December Stepan Gavenda. a tough Czech worker serving a rap for anti-Communist activity, saw a prison work detail taking bricks, sand and cement into a tunnel in the fortress wall. Said Gavenda to his frailer friend Jaroslav Bures. a bookkeeper also convicted for antiCommunism: "Where there is a hole to be filled in, there's a hole to get out." At the first opportunity they explored the tunnel, which proved to be an old gun port, and found the far end jammed with bricks...
...stood up before the five-judge court, Bill Oatis (6 ft., 120 Ibs.) looked even frailer than usual. His glasses were gone, even though he can barely see without them. After railing against all Western newsmen as "trained spies," the prosecutor summed up: "Oatis was particularly dangerous because of his discretion and insistence on only accurate, correct and verified information...