Word: matchstick
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...jagged canyon, he had to ford the.stream 21 times in six miles. Says Pick: "My feet got wet over and over again, and then they softened and the sand got in and made blisters. At night I would pick the grains of sand out of the blisters with a matchstick. I'd start out walking in the morning and it was like walking on red-hot marbles. For the first half-hour it was torture. Then my feet would get numb and it was all right...
Literate Irishmen like to recall the days when their country used to toss huge logs -Joyce, Yeats, Synge-on the fires of 20th century literature. Last month Dublin's Irish Times keened over the current era of matchstick prose and poetry: "Search the horizon as we will, we can see no budding poet, no young incipient novelist . . . The Irish literary Hamlet has expired; the rest is silence." The horizon-searching Irish Times has apparently overlooked a 44-year-old Belfast schoolteacher named Michael McLaverty, who is admittedly no Hamlet, but whose novels make first-rate kindling for a homely...
...titles such as The Blind Man and Rongwrong. There was an ear-splitting kettledrum music to which devotees shrieked verses in gibberish; they built powerfully useless machines, wrote ridiculous "chemical" and "static" poems. Their art was a lunatic satire on all advance-guard art: "modern" pictures of women with matchstick faces, cut-out heads filled with grinding gears and cogs. And when they held an exhibition, they were likely to walk around with white gloves but without ties, meow like cats, carefully count the pearls of visiting dowagers, and invite the boys from the bar next door...
...oftentimes unaware in the darkness whether the man beside them was white or black, the whites learned, painfully and humbly, how black South Africa lives. Some fetched water from filth-encrusted boreholes that had served the whole of Albertynsville; others, ladling out Red Cross soup, porridge and stew to matchstick-legged Negro children, discovered that never in their lives had these children tasted anything so nourishing. Said one white rescuer afterward: "The place had no drainage, no sanitation, no streets and no lighting. Outside the houses, there were open latrines, pits and great piles of rotting rubbish, swarming with millions...
Combustion. The atmosphere was the same in most of Cape Province's polyglot cities. In the diamond town of Kimberley (pop. 75,000), the Negro location sprawls along the railroad tracks; white engineers sometimes scare off the matchstick-limbed Negro children who climb up on to the coaches begging for bread, by letting off gusts of scalding steam from their locomotives. A mob of Negro hoodlums spewed out of their beer halls, burning and pillaging saloons and municipal offices. Police killed 13. Earlier, in Port Elizabeth, four whites were murdered simply because they were whites. South Africans have often...