Word: inert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Greene has a way of decoding signals of despair in a man's face--the hunger to destroy or the wish to die. In Torrijo's "lines of weariness around the eyes," Greene sees what he calls a "charisma of desperation." It communicates an impatience with the inert diplomacy over the Canal issue, but also a desire to leave a mark on history. If he doesn't do so on the dotted line on the document that restores sovereignty over the waterway to Panama, Greene hints he plans to leave it in blood...
...waited on deck," reports Carruthers, the narrator, a clever, foppish young Foreign Office sprig who has just joined Davies, a sea-struck Oxford classmate, on his cruising boat, "and watched the death-throes of the suffocating sands under the relentless onset of the sea ... The Dulcibella, hitherto contemptuously inert, began to wake and tremble under the buffetings she received ... Soon her warp tightened and her nose swung slowly round; only her stern bumped now, and that with decreasing force. Suddenly she was free and drifting broadside to the wind till the anchor checked her and she brought up to leeward...
...luck of the gods fell on Stratford when Maggie Smith was cast in the role. She has an invincible gift for Restoration comedy. She can tease a spasm of laughter from an inert line, and she renders the great set speeches as if Mozart had been transmuted into prose. She makes startlingly effective use of what can only be called Brecht's "alienation effect," inhaling a line in one breath like a drag on a fresh cigarette and instantaneously tossing it away like a dead butt. This is well suited to Congreve, with his worldly ability to appraise life...
This is not necessarily a flaw. L'Avventura seemed initially to be about the search for a woman lost on an island. Then Antonioni -deliberately and to much controversy-abandoned this theme in favor of another, deeper one, a portrait of a whole inert society. In The Passenger, he lets go of the thriller elements midway and starts to concentrate on the growing relationship between Locke and a young tourist (Maria Schneider). But the change of focus does not deepen the picture as it did in L'Avventura. Instead, it diverts it while saying nothing new about Locke...
Surgical Revolution. Doctors have been experimenting since the 1950s with techniques to rebuild amputated breasts with grafts of fatty tissues and implants. Their initial efforts were often unsuccessful. The earlier implants, which consisted of chemically inert plastics, were of a firmer consistency than normal breast tissue and were aesthetic failures; the reconstructed breast was often no more than a hard mound that was usually noticeably smaller than the remaining breast. The plastic, in fact, often shrank and became lumpy after implantation...