Word: myopic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Most of the time bald, myopic, barrel-chested, spindly-legged Pnin wrestles mirthfully with his fate even though he loses most of the falls. Bound for a lecture date, he blithely takes the wrong train after having painstakingly consulted an out-of-date timetable. Bent on being a sports-minded pal to a schoolboy visitor, he remarks chummily that the first description of tennis in Russian literature "is found in Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's novel, and is related to year 1875." Whenever Pnin stops talking, Novelist Nabokov steps in with waspish, high-spirited asides on U.S. higher education, culture...
...remembers her childhood with bitterness: "My sister was slim and beautiful and friendly, and my mother always preferred her. I was the ugly duckling, fat and clumsy and unpopular. It is a cruel thing to make a child feel ugly and unwanted." Forced to wear heavy spectacles for her myopic eyes, little Maria avoided schoolmates, ate compulsively (sometimes a whole pound of cheese at breakfast). "I hated school, I hated everybody. I got fatter and fatter." But when she was eight, she took up music. She saved money to buy opera librettos, and sang at school. Her mother drove...
...when Meneghini suggested that she give up singing, her demon drove her on. Success was in sight. La Scala asked her to do a guest performance of Aida. She accepted, but professed to scoff at the honor: "Sure, it's a magnificent theater. But me, I'm myopic. For me, theaters all look alike. La Scala is La Scala, but I'm Callas. and I'm myopic. Ecco...
...attacks the film's true hero, a shy, sensitive octopus many times the turtle's size. The assault only bores the octopus. Secrets ends with a wild battle between the octopus and the movie's most sinister actor, a moray eel. Result: a draw, with the myopic eel's keen sense of smell fouled up by the wounded octopus' ink defenses...
Since Latin America is the United States' natural relative both in point of geography and because it provides this country with more trade than any other single region, the State Department's non-military attitude seems rather myopic. Latin America provides America with a large part of its oil, copper, lead, and bauxite, yet American foreign affairs experts have not instituted any long range plan to guard our interests...