Word: ornamentations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...impress on the minds of children and youth committed to their care and instruction, the principles of piety, justice and a sacred regard to truth, love to their country, humanity and universal benevolence, sobriety, industry and frugality, chastity; moderation and temperance, and those other virtues which are the ornament of human society, and the basis upon which the republican Constitution is structured; and it shall be duty of such instructors, to endeavour to lead those under their care (as their ages and capacities will admit) into a particular understanding of the tendency of the beforementioned virtues, to preserve and perfect...
Salvinia auriculata is a native of tropical America, and no one knows for sure how it got to Africa. One theory is that a 19th century missionary imported it to ornament a pond. The fern's hairy, half-inch-long leaves grow in pairs on a slender stem. Each broken-off bit of stem can start a new colony. Great islands of weed drift around Kariba Lake, entangling boats and clogging harbors. Fishery experts had been counting on Kariba to support an important fishing industry, as other African lakes do, but under Salvinia's thick floating mats...
Treasure Chest. The necklace contained 647 diamonds weighing some 2,800 carats in all, and to duplicate it today would cost $3,855,500-including, Historian Mossiker notes helpfully, the 10% federal excise tax. This grotesque ornament was invented by the crown jewelers to tempt Madame du Barry, who would probably have bought it if her protector, the goatish Louis XV, had not died of smallpox before the diamonds could be assembled. Antoinette, the new Queen, then seemed the ideal purchaser: her husband had the money, and she, possessing a 43½-inch bust, could set off 647 diamonds properly...
...word that breathes life in poetry is the image-not the image as ornament, but the image as analogy. As a superior example of what he means, MacLeish cites an anonymous Chinese poem...
...reign of pudgy Charles IV, King of Spain from 1788 to 1808, was as squalid as it was tragic, but it did boast one supreme ornament. The Painter to the King was Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes, who left behind on canvas a royal family album that has dazzled the world ever since. Each year thousands of visitors to the Prado in Madrid have come to know Goya's bumbling old King, his sharp-faced Queen, the sulky heir apparent, and a host of beribboned infantes and infantas, all portrayed with ruthless candor. But one member...