Word: gnaw
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Mother Goose's story of bringing home the bacon, the cat, as soon as it got its saucer of milk, began to kill the rat, which began to gnaw the rope, which began to hang the butcher, who began to kill the ox, which began to drink the water, which began to quench the fire, which began to burn the stick, which began to beat the dog, which began to bite the little pig-which then in fright jumped over the stile so that the old woman brought it home from market that night after...
...face wears an agony that in only ten weeks has grown as familiar to millions as Ed Murrow's cigarette or Arthur Godfrey's tea bag. Clamped in a vise of earphones, the eyes roll heavenward and squeeze shut, the brow sweats and furrows, the teeth gnaw at the lower lip. But the weekly torment of concentration always ends in triumph for Charles Lincoln Van Doren, 30, who has already won $122,000-more than any other quiz contestant in history-and is still going strong on NBC's Twenty One (Mon. 9 p.m., E.S.T.). Van Doren...
...heart of the matter is cased in a padding of sociological fat. Life, Aran Islander O'Flaherty seems to say, can only be understood in terms of death. Like many another Irishman, he sees the skull beneath the skin, just as his starveling heroes see the sharp rocks gnaw through the thin soil. ("I wish you a happy death," cries one after another of his characters, as if the wish were the greatest thing life had to offer.) To underline his point that man's nature is animal, O'Flaherty has written of hawks, cows, rockfish, conger...
...simple as to be almost nonexistent is Beckett's tale of two penniless, hapless, smelly tramps waiting, in a barren countryside, for a neighborhood personage named Godot. They chatter, gnaw carrots, tug at a tight shoe, talk of going separate ways and of hanging themselves, encounter a rich, unhappy magnate driving his servant before him as with whips. At the end of Act 1, a boy arrives to say that Godot cannot come that night but will the next. The next night, after further waiting and talking, a boy arrives to say that again Godot cannot come. As before...
According to another theory, only "neurotic" squirrels gnaw. One researcher cooped up a group of squirrels in cages, provided them with all kinds and sizes of cable to chew on (0.5 in. proved most popular). He concluded that young, emotionally unstable squirrels and pregnant squirrels undergoing a change in their nervous systems are the most destructive gnawers. It was not as easy to find a solution, however. Emotionally upset squirrels, the engineers found, do not insist on lead sheaths; they are just as eager to chew on cables wrapped with copper screening or glass tape...