Word: grotto
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Colloquial abbreviation for "How do you do?" Equivalent to Masonic-Grotto-men's "Hey, Prophet...
...caned them smartly. As a madman, King Ludwig demanded and obtained, among other whims: 1) lifesize clockwork peacocks made to open their wings composed of thousands of bits of colored glass; 2) a sumptuous barge drawn by mechanical swans in which he sailed about as Lohengrin; 3) an artificial grotto simulating that at Capri...
...grotto Ludwig made an unmitigated curse. He thought, or pretended to think, that the lighting never exactly reproduced the marvelous tint of blue for which the grotto of Capri is famed. Lights of every sort were tried. Finally enormous arc lights were installed, and in the confined space of the grotto workmen tending them were almost roasted. A courtier protested. "Stop!" commanded King Ludwig, "I don't wish to know how the light is made, I only care to see the effect. It is not right...
There follow in rapid succession the Vale of Tempe, the summit of Parnassus, scaling the Acropolis at midnight, wooing the Maidens of the Porch by Attic moonlight, swimming the Hellespont, climbing Stromboli and Vesuvius, trying to swim from whirling Charybdis to rocky Scylla, singing "Funiculi, Funicula" in the Blue Grotto to an English girl with an Alice-blue Rolls-Royce, climbing Aetna, playing Ulysses ("handsome, heaven-sent Greek") to a 65-year-old bobbed grandmother's Calypso, and reading "The Return of Ulysses" at Ithaca, having completed what was begun, a trip in the wandering wake of Ulysses doing...
There naval officials descended into the gruesome, barnacled grotto of the dead, and as they fumbled through the rusty, sea-fouled compartments, scenes of the death struggles were revealed. Men had stuck to their posts. Inside the gash where the Rome had bitten, pinned between the bent steel plates and the engineroom bulkhead, was the body of a seaman. One arm was stretched out in an effort to grasp the lever which would have closed an emergency valve and perhaps have saved the lives of some of his fellows...