Word: gracelessness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...theater to dance. In a spirit that combines a touch of Shakespearean drama with Hasty Pudding theatricals, the ever predictable evil stepsisters are not so predictable. In the first scene of Act I, the stepsisters enter the stage dauntingly tall, grotesquely covered in makeup, and shockingly clumsy, heavy and graceless. If this contrast to the traditional, petite, lithesome ballerina did not tune one in, the exposure of bulging arms and gigantic hands by the middle of the act confirm that these step "sisters", brilliantly performed by Todd Eric Allen and Howard Merlin, are simply not women...
...first glance, Square dancing looksesoteric and confusing, but it soon loses its auraof mystery. (See sidebox on terminology.) If acaller is good, the moves come relatively easily,and dancers "get into the groove" as the eveningprogresses. Anyone who feels graceless should trysquare dancing. The swing and the swirl of it,the twirl and the taunt of it will make eventhose with two left feet feel like...
Guinea hens are bald, wattled and graceless. They resemble feathered footballs. Worse, they are surly, loud and unmusical, often at 3 in the morning. But they are voracious gobblers of bugs and are especially fond of the tiny deer ticks that carry the spirochetes of Lyme disease. Which is why model Christie Brinkley, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's swimsuit sweetie some years ago, learned to love them. She has installed a flock on her estate in East Hampton, N.Y., and hands out chicks (called keets) to her neighbors...
...Bible banishes words, like whom, that are dying out in everyday American speech, as well as theological favorites, like righteousness. Even grace, the term that launched Luther's Reformation, has been replaced with the bland "kindness." The graceless Bible is also as genderless as possible. For all that, the Bible society claims that the Good Book's "majesty and poetry" have survived...
...makan is intoxication enough. It was out of the desert that humans conjured monotheism -- absolute God to suffuse utter emptiness. When kan ya makan enters politics, its genius makes language a reality superior to the deed -- even renders the facts of the objective world unnecessary and graceless. The vivid hallucination becomes the act: the prophecy is more satisfying than its literal fulfillment. If the demagogue-bard says the infidel will swim in his own blood, then words have pre-empted the work of armies. Ambiguity has an ancient history in the West, but the Middle East has its special genius...