Word: purrs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That Carnegie Hall has passed into legend. In its place is a brighter, more brilliant performance space whose sound has a sharper, harder edge. Woodwinds and brass now glitter where once they gleamed. At the same time, cellos and double basses purr where once they roared. Carnegie Hall now sounds crisper, although it still retains much of its fabled warmth. In its new incarnation, it is closer to Boston's lush but clear Symphony Hall than to its former voluptuous self...
Rand's Christmas present to his son is stranger and more wondrous than any of his own inventions: a little animal called a Mogwai, with a kitten's purr and the forlorn eyes of an orphan puppy. The creature, whom Billy's dad dubs Gizmo, arrives with enough warnings to fill a Tylenol label three times over: Keep him away from water; keep him out of the light; and never never feed him after midnight. A few drops of water inadvertently fall on Gizmo, and pop! pop! pop! pop! pop!, five living fur balls fly from...
...words that are easiest to spot are epithets and endearments: blockhead, scumbum, heel, sweetheart, darling, great human being and the like. All such terms are so full of prejudice and sentiment that S.I. Hayakawa, a semanticist before he became California's U.S. Senator, calls them "snarl-words and purr-words...
...promote his latest anthology, In Our Time. and the paperback version of his bestseller, The Right Stuff. The limo suits him fine, he tells a passenger, but he would rather be at home in New York City. "I've become a terrible, doting daddy," he says, the fine purr of Virginia landowner still evident in his voice. A daughter has arrived in his life since his last conversation with the passenger. "Forty days old," he says; his pride mixes with a chuckle about the obscurity of the landmark...
...MacNeil, Dirksen "bellowed his speeches in a mongrel mix of grand opera and hog calling." Over the years, he developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr. Would he criticize an erring colleague? someone would ask. "I shall invoke upon him every condign imprecation," Dirksen would intone, with a quiver of his basset's jowls and the gold-gray ringlets of his hair...