Word: pointing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Greek peasant. The engineer was taking a sight through his transit along a rural road when the countryman rode up on a donkey. The Greek watched in mystified silence for some time, and then asked the American what he was up to. "Measuring the shortest distance between this point and that village over there," explained the American. "Well," the peasant muttered half to himself, "that certainly seems a complicated way to do such a simple job." "Is that so?" asked the engineer. "And just how would you go about it?" "Well," said the Greek, "I'd just let this...
...shek threw himself against the Japanese, most of his military strength was spent harrying the Communists from province to province. Chiang made the south too hot for the Communists, but in 1934, led by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, they marched 6,000 miles from the farthest point in Fukien Province to the red loess hills of Shensi, and set up a Communist capital at Yenan...
Degas' strong point, Valéry thought, was his "taste, a quality rather uncommon among artists." His taste made him as critical of his own work as he was of his critics; when people praised him he laughed in their faces. "He could not conceive of an artist seeing one of his paintings after a lapse of time without wanting to work on it again. Occasionally he would even carry off paintings that had hung for a long time on the walls of friends' rooms, taking them back to his lair, from which they rarely reappeared...
...dramatize this point, Manhattan's publicity-wise Museum of Modern Art was staging a show last week that paired ancient distortions with modern distortions-and implied that both were good. A paleolithic fetish 77,000 years old and shaped like a bunch of grapes made Gaston Lachaise's blimpish Standing Woman (1932) look a comparatively svelte great-granddaughter. A Canaanite idol dated 1000 B.C. seemed a more attenuated ancestor of Wilhelm Lehmbruck's Standing Youth, done in 1913 (see cuts). The horse in Picasso's Guernica was no more or less weird than the deerhead mask...
...over?" Wildman brandished his prized 30-inch Dragon Smoky Malacca, "a very pliant and punishing cane." "And how many strokes do you advise?" Headmaster Copping asked. Smiling, Wildman suggested "Six of the best, in the place that seems to have been provided by nature for the purpose." At that point, Headmaster Copping gave a signal...