Word: preys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...work on his estate, he frankly considers them inferiors who rely on "temperament" instead of "temperance." He is contemptuous of the local party hack, who spouts Nazi clichés, but he has also a sneaking admiration for him: "In his round eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, I saw the extinct race of ancient Rome, which had marched intrepidly over the whole expanse of the ancient world and conquered it." He admits his isolation from the mainstream of European life: "The most worthless German parvenu was closer and more understandable to me than an educated foreigner...
Messkirch is thus easy prey for the Nazis. Indifferent for most of the war, he suddenly gets word that his only son, Otto, has been killed in ambush in France. In his anguish, he turns for guidance to the only philosophy he knows-the Nibelungen lore. "Only blood could atone for the blood of my son," he concludes from his primitive reading, and this judgment is confirmed by the Nazis: "The principle of revenge permeated every aspect of our collective struggle in the Third Reich. Vengeance was the reason why our flying bombs thundered over the enemy's territory...
There were a lot of things Johnson did not know. A tarantula is not "an insect whose bite is only cured by musick"; a cassowary is not a bird of prey; and only a jack pudding or zany would believe that pygmies are devoured by cranes. Whether today's lexicographers are wiser is another matter. Johnson may not have known what a masochist was (the eponymous Herr von Masoch had not yet been born to give his name to those who find pleasure in their own pain), but Lexicographer Johnson had a word for the type...
...this is amiably flavorsome matzo-ball soup opera. Gertrude Berg is flawless in her comic timing, wry-arch in gesticulation, a singsong bird of prey who pounces on the feeblest line for a resounding laugh. For wit, there are Jewish folk inflections; for character, stereotypes; for comic insight, racial in-group jokes. Following up on his 1959 hit, A Majority of One, Spigelgass proves that he can bring in greenback gushers without any risky drilling for dramatic art. He is a situation tinker, and his vocation is to be not a playwright but a millionaire...
...competition for markets bids fair to be a more fruitful cause of war than was ever in the past the ambition of princes or the bigotry of priests. The peoples of Europe fling themselves, like hungry beasts of prey, on every yet unexploited quarter of the world... But always while they divide the spoil, they watch one another with a jealous eye; and sooner or later, when there is nothing left to divide, they will fall upon one another. That is the real meaning of your armaments; you must devour or be devoured. And it is precisely these trade relations...