Word: girth
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...cult of the opera singer, in fact, is spiced with more fads, phobias and superstitions than are found in most primitive cultures. The most persistent myth is that girth somehow determines worth, a legend that one doctor says stems from the fact that many of the early Italian singers seemed to be congenitally fat. Today, however, with the emphasis on realistic drama and the lure of TV and films, the net weight of the singers has dropped a ton or two since the early 1900s. Still, most of them are not exactly skinny. Singing opera is extremely demanding physically...
...having informed the reader that some character has picked up a phone, cannot get on with the story before informing the reader that the character has put the phone down. Thorp, his publisher and the Literary Guild (whose June selection it is) are impressed by the book's girth, but no one else should be. The story, about homosexual murder, is unbelievable, the denouement unacceptable. Author Thorp can probably write a readable book if he ever learns to stop answering the telephone...
...Balzac did not look or act like a writer, and the literary assessors of his time declined to treat him as one. He was short, fat, gap-toothed, messy, and, according to one contemporary, had "the face of a pantler, the general look of a cobbler, the girth of a barrelmaker, the manners of a hatter." Estimates of his work were hardly more flattering: Sainte-Beuve dismissed his style as "prolix and formless, slack." The author of La Comédie Humaine, that panorama of post-revolutionary France, died up to his chins in debt to his mother, wife, sister...
...line commanders, both the III Corps and the Capital Military Region are in the hands of generals born in North Viet Nam-and close friends of Ky. The Mekong Delta, or the IV Corps, is the domain of Major General Dan Van Quang, 36, a rough soldier whose girth and ready laughter have earned him the nickname "Jolly Green Giant" from his American advisers...
...Francisco Franco Bahamonde has mellowed considerably. The years, and a strict low-calorie diet, have whittled away his girth but not, apparently, his strength. Always an avid sportsman, he now spends almost as much time hunting and fishing as he does in the Pardo, his 16th century palace just north of Madrid. His stamina is remarkable. He can still bound up hillsides after mountain goats, shoot 300 partridges a day, and wade for hours hip-deep in the icy mountain streams of Asturias...