Word: mania
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...America's pet hobbies is "pledging." The average American gives little thought to signing a pledge, and so this process of extracting promises has become a much abused one. The pledge-making mania has not stopped with the Boy Scouts and Sunday School but has found its way into prospective legislation in the form of a bill now before the New York Assembly which proposes that public school teachers be required to take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. The purpose of the bill is to eliminate communistic and other extreme propaganda threatening our present system of government. Harvard...
...only Jack likes Victoriana. Of similar affections are rats, for whom Jack has no affection. Indeed, he has a mania, one might say. Where Jack's mania takes him is hard to tell. When at last an exterminator succeeds in catching a few rats, the rats start killing themselves off by eating gold leaf, becoming $100 rats...
...slow to arrive at decisions, he partly made up for it by a relentless, austere capacity for hard work. Even at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo, Pope Pius had a mania about wasting a second. Sitting under a red umbrella in the shade of a huge ilex tree (he could not bear strong sunlight), or walking briskly in his shaded garden, he kept his nose buried in documents he was studying. During his solitary, silent and frugal meals, Pius listened to the news broadcasts, but so chary was he of an unnecessary word that once when he sneezed...
...skull egg-bald in hopes of growing thicker hair. When not engaged in scalping himself, he bangs pans by day and bumblefoots around the local talent (Felicia Farr) by night, but hits stormy weather on both fronts. His chief cook (Walter Matthau), a sardonic old coot with a mania for cinnamon rolls, marries the girl. Then Cookie ships out for convoy duty, and Griffith finds himself heating up both the gal and the gallery...
Dulcinea Smith is a witless, bromidic, meddlesome but well-meaning woman with a mania for engineering other people's lives. She manages to have a finger in every pie and a foot in every mouth. In a bridge game she wonders whether she should "discard from strength or weakness." Actually, she does everything from weakness...