Word: lustrum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, an unsurpassed mnemonic feat of verbatim reporting, which has been reissued in paperback and even translated into Arabic. But, steadfastly refusing all honors and awards, he especially enjoyed writing under the shielding "Uncle Dudley" byline of the Boston Globe, whose pages he graced, lustrum after lustrum, for an entire half-century. His Sunday editorials, always timely, were usually timeless as well, and unexcelled in any other newspaper...
...Between radio and cinema, he bests all rivals as a double-draw; the name Hope has become a radio synonym for Tuesday night, has helped make the Road to Morocco almost as famous as the Road to Mandalay. Yet his huge mike-and-movie success is less than a lustrum old. And it is so huge it obliterates all memory of Hope as a vaudeville headliner and a Broadway star...
Social life in Delft is symbolized by the "Lustrum" celebrations, a masquerade carnival held every five years. Everybody takes this pageant very seriously. The actors try to follow orders "to give the impression that we really are what we want to represent." On stage and off this is what the younger generation is taught to do. Tina van Ravensberg would rather try to represent what she really is, but there is no room for that sort of thing in her society...
Spanish scurriers to dictionaries were intrigued and mystified by the primary meaning of lustrum: a Latin word signifying the festival at which Romans purified themselves by sacrificing to the Gods many a pig, sheep, bull. Was beefy Dictator de Rivera announcing Spanish sacrifices of pork, mutton, beef...
More appropriate seemed the second but obscure meaning of lustrum: a period of five years. On September 15, 1928, Dictator de Rivera will have been in power for one whole lustrum. "At that time," he declared last week, "my government will address the country respecting the new laws [said to envision merely the creation of an advisory Assembly, with Parliament continuing suppressed]. . . . These measures will be submitted to a national plebiscite...