Word: gem
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...look at me from the depths of the earth, tiller of fields, weaver, reticent shepherd . . . jeweler with crushed fingers . . . say to me: here I was scourged because a gem was dull or because the earth failed to give up in time its tithe of corn or stone. Point out to me the rock on which you stumbled, the wood they used to crucify your body...
...Blue Gem. A few days later, Hoover ordered Sullivan to take two weeks' leave. Sullivan wrote back that a one-week vacation was all he needed. The memo came back inscribed with what is known in the FBI as a "blue gem"-a handwritten note from the director. (Hoover is the only person in the FBI who uses blue ink, so that his messages are instantly recognizable. Other FBI officials use pencil, in part because if they approve a memo moving up the chain of command and then Hoover inks in his disapproval, they can erase their judgment...
Tamil Nadu's chief minister, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, a teetotaler himself, was obviously irked when legislative assembly members greeted his decision with cheers. The move had been more or less forced upon him. As Karunanidhi metaphorically put it, the state had become "a gem of camphor surviving unlit in the midst of the flaming tongues of a hoop of fire"-meaning that thirsty Tamils had only to drive to adjoining Pondicherry, Mysore, Kerala or Andhra Pradesh for a drink. There was also an overriding economic reason for repeal. The state faces an $80 million budget deficit. Toddy will bring...
...Bosporus alongside the Topkapi Palace. One day, harem-scare-em Ibrahim ordered his 1,001 concubines trussed, weighted and tossed into the sea-and, of course, replaced. But between fits of madness, Ibrahim and the 24 other sultans who occupied Topkapi until the 1850s turned the palace into a gem of art and architecture...
...distinctions between kinds of moral arguments. His view was that if you use moral arguments, "it implies that you're better than anybody else" (Kahn's version of "who're you to decide what's right?"). After some mumbling along these lines, he capped his preamble with the following gem, which I q?ute nearly verbatim: "Samuel Johnson once said that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I'd like to change that to 'Morality is the last refuge of a scoundrel...