Word: ironical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bangladesh, there are barely rations to provide even gruel for the starving in Dacca's crowded refugee camps. Children are so emaciated-their flesh clinging to their brittle bones-that they almost look like deformed infants. Shortages of vitamin A, iron and iodine in India and Bangladesh are increasing the incidence-especially among the young-of goiter, blindness and cretinism...
...calisthenics, spending an hour every morning hardening his gut by doing sit-ups with his legs held up at a 45 degree angle or while his limbs were pumping back and forth in a bicycle-pedaling motion. Now he was simply letting Foreman punch himself out against that iron flesh. "I wanted to make him shoot his best shots," said Ali later...
Most of us scarcely use words at all, tending to make our needs known to each other through inflection, gesture, and yelling. At work we signal each other with arm and hand motions, with bells, and by banging on the iron with wrenches, because the noisiness of a construction site precludes ordinary speech, and most of us, after spending a few years alongside air compressors, jack hammers, unmuffled donkey engines, and welding machines, are deaf anyway...
...much like automatons with accents he reverts to a "fun" incident--the workers playing a joke on an apprentice named Peter the Putrid Punk, or collecting on a girder to watch the hookers go by on Sixth Avenue. But the games are usually just buddies horsing around--not iron-workers--and they seem artificially imposed, stuck in to jazz up the plodding descriptions of the work...
...reading the book: the revelations come in spurts and cut themselves short. He's bored: the job has made him feel that it just doesn't matter to write it all down because his readers are bigwigs and wouldn't understand anyway and hell, he could fall off the iron tomorrow...