Word: pious
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that Indonesian Reds had to cheer about last week was the state visit of aging Ho Chi Minh, President of Communist North Viet Nam. Wisp-bearded Ho kissed all the pretty girls in sight, thus scandalizing pious Moslems, who complained that his bussing of young women was "an overt violation of Moslem law." Sukarno, who always likes to say what visitors like to hear, called Ho "one of the greatest men in Asia." General Abdul Haris Nasution and his army kept order and their own counsel...
...issued him at the prison gate, and his condition as hopeless as the five shillings in his pocket. Slowly, as the Irish say, it is "let on" that Peter was a "dismantled Roman wreck," having studied unsuccessfully for the priesthood; that his father was a seaman, his mother a pious termagant, his brother a "great, rearing, clumsy bucko." Why was Peter in jail? The question involves a real novelist's art-the reverse of the whodunit, which is to disclose the crime and disguise the motive. Halfway through the book, when all the motives are clarified, Peter...
Hidden Flames. A major breakthrough in Byzantine art was the rediscovery of the Russian icon, one of the great, traditional art forms. Medieval Russians carried wonderworking icons into battle against the Tartars, held them aloft in religious processions, encrusted church partitions with them. Because pious tradition held that the earliest images were painted-from-life portraits of New Testament figures, the icons were scrupulously copied for some 800 years, repaired when damaged and endlessly varnished...
...later, when "Syr Thomas Maleore, knyght" put together Morte d'Arthur, he was already synthesizing a well-encrusted legend, the sources of which he "dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe." Another 400 years and the parfit gentil knights in the pious allegories of Alfred Lord Tennyson startlingly resembled iron-padded Victorian cricketers, later followed by Mark Twain's slapstick farce and the droll sophistications of John Erskine...
Lourdes hucksters gave no sign that they saw any such error. In this centennial year, pilgrims are expected to spend more than $190 million on pious objects. Even the smallest shop near the shrine is estimated to be worth almost $200,000 to its owner. Lourdes has now even put hinges on its street signs to reroute traffic through a different area of town every two weeks so as to give each merchant an equal crack at the pilgrims...