Word: ordeal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
STONE sets Plato's Socratic dialogues against the accounts of contemporary Greek dramatists to try to reconstruct the story of Socrates and Athens. Plato, Socrates' Boswell, so to speak, was often disingenuous in recounting his mentor's ordeal. Through Plato, Socrates became a noble martyr forced to drink the hemlock because of he constantly exhorted his fellow Athenians to virtue. But, Stone writes, Socrates wasn't tried simply for being a nudge. Socrates may be "revered as a nonconformist, but few realize that he was a rebel against an open society and the admirer of a closed...
Practicing law and giving lectures, Hart felt discredited and abandoned. He found it an ordeal, he confided, even to drive to work each Monday morning. "You go crazy," he said, "if you're trained to be a quarterback and then sit on the sidelines." Even the indignity of renewed personal scrutiny would be better than that. "Life holds no terrors for me anymore," he said...
...obviously very disappointed," Deaver, 49, said on the courthouse steps. "But at the same time I know in my heart that I'm innocent. And this has been a long ordeal for my family...
...tribute to the tenacity of federal negotiators. Day after day they put the safety of the 89 hostages above any impatience in dealing with the balky, shifting factions of 1,100 Cuban detainees who had seized control of the prison. Not a single hostage was injured, and when the ordeal finally came to an end at 1 a.m. last Friday, an unusual scene occurred. As the released prison guards began rushing out of the prison, many stopped to embrace their inmate captors. Each group wished the other well. Then the hostages ran into the arms of their waiting families...
Truths sometimes do emerge from this ordeal by interview, but all too often even the most innovative and intrusive questions meet canned replies. How could they not? By this point in a campaign, a candidate has answered more & repetitive questions than a Soviet defector undergoing a CIA debriefing. Spontaneity is in such short supply that the press treats an original response as if it were the skeleton key to the candidate's soul. Such scrutiny is the enemy of candor, since contenders face no short-term dangers by telling the truth as blandly as possible...