Word: goad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...muggers, everyone he meets is unfailingly helpful and kind; he has no difficulty finding jobs, an apartment, friends of both sexes. Yet every fairy tale needs to have a wicked witch; her broomstick is always useful as a lever to pry us upright in our seats and as a goad to keep us there. -By Richard Schickel
Author Sinclair Lewis, whose position as National Champion Castigator is challenged only by his fellow idealist, Critic Henry Louis Mencken, has made another large round-up of grunting, whining, roaring, mewing, driveling, snouting creatures-of fiction-which, like an infuriated swineherd, he can beat, goad, tweak, tail-twist, eye-jab, belly-thwack, spatter with sty-filth and consign to perdition. The new collection closely resembles the herd obtained on the Castigator's last foray, against the medical profession (Arrowsmith, 1925) and a parallel course is run, from upcreek tabernacles, through a hayseed college and seminary to a big-city...
...report argued that the highly accurate, nearly 100-ton MX, with ten warheads, is needed immediately to "remove the Soviet advantage in ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] capability" and goad Russia into serious arms-reduction negotiations. For the 1990s, however, the so-called Midgetman missile must be developed because, with one warhead to the MX's ten, it would make a less tempting target to the Soviets...
...control as individuals-not merely outside the law, but out of biological order. Something stirs, an ancient reflex, as if they are dragged back through history to a starting point in evolution. The mob is a pack, its prey the female. Her difference is the instigator, her frailty the goad. Rape what you cannot have. Plunder what you can never know. Mystery equals fear equals rage equals death. It is she who stands for all life's threats, she who released animal instinct in the first place. Once aroused, why stop to reason or sympathize? The savage surfaces, prevails...
...stories to friends and neighbors ("11 p.m. Friday night, and the Science Center library, it' full"), you can secretly admire them for caring about something for its own sake (sort of the same admiration that everyone accords a young man entering the priesthood), but they're not such a goad to the conscience as to win the rest of us away from the barrooms, the newspaper offices, the klieg lights, or the playing fields. So a huzza for them, and for the sheer candlepower they generate for the rest of us to loll painlessly...