Word: frogged
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...great age and developed to enormous proportions. What he did for the tree he also did for his career. When Twain sailed for Honolulu as a South Pacific correspondent for the powerful, popular Sacramento Union, his literary reputation rested uncertainly on one widely read newspaper story: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." When he returned to California four months later, his newsy and engaging letters from Hawaii had made him "the best-known honest man on the Pacific Coast...
...HUMOR can be dissected, as a frog can," E. B. White once warned, "but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind...
Perhaps I should add that on an impulse I had taken my little boy, thinking--as proved true--that for him the violence and bloodshed would be absorbed easily into that other universe, that shadowy world of myth that already includes Snow White, the Frog King and Little Red Riding Hood. That's how it went. My little boy was deeply interested, thought the movie "wonderful", was not horrified. But how tell him why grownups were laughing? Fortunately he didn't ask. George Wald
Meanwhile, his teachers were besieging his parents with letters complaining about his incorrigible behavior at school: "He jumps like a frog and that's about all he knows; he even dances on the staircase landings." His father ordered him to give up dancing. He acquiesced, but invented excuses to slip away at night to neighboring villages to perform with a touring folk-dance group. The performances were held by the light of kerosene lamps on an improvised stage suspended between two trucks...
Indeed, it was more a condition than a voice-something like three parts fog to one part frog. A doctor, upon hearing him for the first time, rushed up to caution: "With a throat like that, you should be home in bed." But that hoarse, honey-cured quality carried a certain tranquilizing caress that was his vocal signature and sustained him admirably through the years while legions of belters and bleaters flourished and died. With moistened lips and a flashing, yard-wide smile, he let a song uncurl from his cavernous mouth with the nonchalance of a man blowing smoke...