Word: peculiar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...shape of Calvino's parables is a constant. Each embodies some philosophical conceit, some paradox of perception or memory, and each finds form in a peculiar kind of physical description. The invisible cities bulge with imaginative and very specific detail: Chloe is peopled by "a girl twirling a parasol on her shoulder," "a woman in black, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling," "a young man with white hair," and "two girls, twins, dressed in coral." In Eusapia, a city of the dead...
...wives. Like the protagonist in her story A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, she could say: "Son, I can love anything." Nevertheless, Biographer Carr judges, she preferred women. Her often unrequited infatuations ranged from Isak Dinesen to Marilyn Monroe. "I was born a man," Carson once declared with a peculiar amalgam of imagination and truth...
...Wilson. It was Winslow Homer time, when, as Doctorow writes, "a certain light was still available along the Eastern seaboard." Eccentrics still putter in their garages and produce inventions without the aid of research-and-development bureaucracies. Henry Ford's new assembly line and Albert Einstein's peculiar idea that the universe is curved crack the dawn of the modern age. Before long, Doctorow notes, painters in Paris will be putting two eyes on one side of the head...
...children. A New York study of nine juvenile murderers, including a girl who had chopped a victim to pieces with a machete knife, showed that all nine had been routinely beaten by their parents. Other youths who commit and later talk about the most heinous crimes with peculiar indifference "don't seem to realize they are putting a knife into another human being," says Willard Gaylin, professor of psychiatry and law at Columbia University. Gaylin believes this insensibility stems from a lack of identity with anyone else or with the community. "These kids have been so brutalized that there...
...making of America was the unmaking of these clichés. Here it was discovered that no people was quite as peculiar as Old World nationalist leaders had urged them to believe. You became an American by coming to a strange land and learning to speak somebody else's language. Broken English would be the only tongue that really expressed our history. No wonder, then, that education became our national fetish, for the public schoolroom was the frontier of the mind, where children of older nations learned to speak a common language...