Word: rackely
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Worms like Sticky Pearls. Outwardly, Sylvia's psychosis has standard Freudian trimmings. Her father, born in the Polish town of Grabow in East Prussia, became a professor of entomology at Boston University and is presented in her poetry as an intellectual tyrant with "a love of the rack and the screw." The mother of the heroine in The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel published in England just before Sylvia's death, is described as a metallic New England schoolmarm. Little Sylvia tried to be Daddy's darling. At three she knew the Latin names of hundreds...
...evidence to charge the suspect. Today the rules are said to be widely ignored, and with crime soaring, some eminent Britons argue that the privilege against self-incrimination is outdated. The privilege does have old-fashioned roots. It originated in repugnance for such long-vanished torture methods as the rack and the screw. Now that British police are civilized, say the critics, why forbid them merely to ask questions-thus stacking the odds in favor of criminals...
...shut up in a pestilential prison, fed on sawdust and water, and confined in stocks or manacles for as much as two or three years before the bishop bothered to bring him to trial. Usually the prisoner was beaten by his jailers; often he was put to the rack. A nasty bishop named Boner once held a prisoner's hand over a candle flame "till the sin ews burst, and the water did spurt into the dean's face." Accused heretics not infrequently died of mistreatment before they could be executed, and quite often went insane. But according...
...ones Jack Benny's reply to the robber who demanded his money or life. When I mentioned this old radio classic to Benny recently, he said: "That was our longest laugh. But the one I like best was on our TV show. My trousers were draped on a rack, and when a delivery boy came in, Rochester got a quarter out of my pocket and tipped the boy. Then I came in, hefted my trousers once, and said, 'Rochester, who took a quarter out of my pants?' Now THAT'S damn funny...
Contemplated Horror. Wisconsin Circuit Judge Elmer Roller is unimpressed. Although the Braves have already moved lock, stock and bat rack to Atlanta, he ruled last week that his court still has jurisdiction. The question before him, he pointed out, is whether or not the move violated Wisconsin law. Only a trial can provide an answer, and he wants the Braves around to play if the trial goes against them. "Pending further order of this court," he said, the Braves and the rest of the league should prepare themselves to do one of two things: either keep the Braves in Milwaukee...