Word: plangently
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Against these plangent strings of personality is the oboe howl and twitter of Niall Buggy as the only son, a pixilated and desperate man steeped in family lore who nonetheless bolted half a continent away. For him and his kin, heritage is a cruel joke masquerading as an oracle...
...then, does the exposure of Boggs, though so much less important, feel so much more plangent than the rejection of Tower? Perhaps because we place more faith in our athletic superstars, and expect more faithfulness in return. Heroism is famously a game of inches: get a little too close to a role model, catch him at the backstage entrance, and the loss can be desolating. Admiration is itself a form of suspended disbelief; turning a blind eye can be as much an act of forgiveness as turning the other cheek. We cannot afford to see our heroes at too close...
These are the candid, plangent voices of Israel's soldiers, angry reservists confronting Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir last week in a makeshift encampment outside Nablus, the largest and most turbulent Arab city on the occupied West Bank. Nothing since the 1982 war in Lebanon has eaten into the heart of Israel's most revered institution, the Israel Defense Forces, as the past 14 months of bitter war against children and stones has done. Seemingly impervious to Israel's iron fist, the Palestinian uprising rages on, and that is exacting a price from the I.D.F. measured less in injuries than...
Midway through Chekhov's last play, written as he was dying, a plangent twang is heard by the members and hangers-on of a once grand family on the verge of eviction from its estate. Everybody perceives the sound, which Chekhov likens in the stage directions to a snapping string, but each has his own sense of what it meant. To one, it suggests the call of a heron; to another, an owl; and to a third, a cable breaking in a distant mine shaft. In most productions the moment is a throwaway. In a few it hints...
...exotic features and bossa-nova ballads into a boffo LP. Anita Baker poured the ache of jazz into pop and sold a couple million copies of Rapture. All over the dial, female singers are anchoring distinctive personalities to the sound of soul on silk. But none have hit the plangent chord struck by John and Cissy Houston's little girl...