Word: heft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...brought up to believe that it is polite to wait until you are asked," Soprano Eileen Farrell invariably replied when people wondered why she had never sung at the Met. The Metropolitan Opera's Rudolf Bing continued to ignore Farrell, either because of misplaced gallantry over her heft (5 ft. 5½ in., 180 Ibs.) or because of her limited operatic repertory. But the snub did not hinder the progress of Farrell's career or silence the critics, who acclaimed her the U.S.'s top soprano. Finally, a year ago, Bing and the Met beckoned, and last...
Attractive Reticence. In his preface, O'Hara mentions the weight factor in bookselling and hopes that readers will not apply the heft test to his small volumes. He need have no fears; done up in a slipcase, the novellas are not only handsome but hefty, and the publisher is able to ask as much for about 60,000 words of text as he does for 260,000. Regrettably, O'Hara also reports that he is working on his heftiest novel yet (previous record: 897 pages in From the Terrace), apparently ignoring the fact that his jumbo works...
When they get the heft of the tools, Teacher De Long's students move on to consider emotions. "What is this writer doing with these words?" she asks, and the writer may be a True Story fictioneer or the adman who coined the phrase, "Ocean-Combed Percales" ("Can the ocean comb anything?"). If the writer is Shakespeare, she wants to know precisely and specifically how the reader is made to feel, for instance, the evil in Lady Macbeth. If the writer is a student, she wants him to say precisely what he feels. "Everything goes back to this general...
...observation. He can mimic a stranger on sight, often fools seals by flapping his arms like flippers until he is near enough to throw a harpoon. In his art, he can catch the look of the injured bear, the tension of the hunter standing over a seal hole, the heft and hunch of a seal's body resting on an ice floe...