Word: poked
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Peru's coast is even more paradoxical than its mountains: it is a desert that blooms, an air-conditioned strand in the tropics. Only 10 to 100 miles wide, the coastland stretches for 1,400 miles. Rain is virtually unknown there, but 52 well-fed rivers poke down the plunging mountains. Dammed and channeled, this water turns the valleys green with sugar cane, ripens grapes for Peru's famed pisco brandy, grows the fine, long-staple cotton that is king of the country's exports. The Humboldt Current cools the whole coast, and as a crowning convenience...
...Summer Tan would be continuing their thrilling two-year-old feud. But the crowd had taken a fancy to California-bred Swaps. Now he was their 14-5 second choice-high esteem for a colt whose ex-cowboy owner had come to Kentucky in 1933 with $600 in his poke and a yen to buy some brood mares. By 1946 Ellsworth was successful enough to buy a brown horse named Khaled from the Aga Khan, and last week Khaled's son Swaps was carrying the red-and-black Ellsworth colors in their first Derby...
...blunt. Among the urbane Oxford and Cambridge tones of the House of Commons, her voice sounds rough and raucous as a Liverpool fishwife's. In the mannered cut-and-thrust of debate, her points are as emphatic as the slap of a wet cod across a face. Newspapers poke sly fun at her, other M.P.s snicker at her, county squires snort: "She's a disgrace to public life." But among her constituents in Liverpool's grimy dockland, Mrs. Bessie Braddock, M.P., is a beloved and admired champion...
...warmth and lavishness of Café Filho's reception sprang from the abiding affection the Portuguese feel for their huge ex-colony. The affection is mutual. Though Brazilians and Portuguese love to poke fun at each others' accents, customs and national traits, the ties of sentiment between the two countries are notably stronger than those between Spain and the former Spanish colonies in the New World -partly because Brazil won her independence from Portugal (in 1822) without gunfire and bloodshed. When Portugal got into a quarrel with India last year over the tiny colony of Goa, Brazil sent...
...year-old Galileo tried to poke his telescope through the stuffed flue of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian universe, and ran into trouble. In any other hands, the telescope might have been only a passing novelty. In Galileo's it pointed back to a neglected but explosive treatise called Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, written a half-century before by Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. On mathematical grounds, Copernicus had questioned the natural philosophy of Aristotle and the astronomy of Ptolemy which taught that the earth stood still in the center of the universe while the heavens revolved around it every 24 hours...