Word: rife
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While drawing their vaudevillian routines from the bottom of a gunny sack indelibly marked CORN, these entertainers engage in enough adventures and misadventures to stock a TV mini-series- though much of it would have to be blipped out, since the show is rife with four-letter words, most of which begin with...
Perhaps because they are so different, rumors are rife that Jane appalls Fred and Fred appalls Jane. But insiders say the relationship is perfectly correct and functional so far. Says one: "There is no needling or irritation between them. If there were, I'd see it." In a recent interview with TIME's Mary Cronin and Laurence I. Barrett, the NBC executives occasionally finished each other's sentences, like a cozy married couple. Still, in an atmosphere of crisis, the notion persists that one must eventually knife the other...
This land "of delicate, delectable emptiness," named for a vanished biblical kingdom, is also rife with American influence. Racial mixing can produce beautiful results; cultural miscegenation tends toward ludicrous juxtapositions. The snap of bubble gum is heard in the Koran school. Fashionably oversize sunglasses are worn by women in purdah while their denimed daughters in platform shoes kick up the dust in the streets of Istiqlal, the capital. Down in the slums the click of cal abashes and the muezzin's call to prayer compete with an alien rhythm, "with words, repeated in the tireless ecstasy of religious chant...
Brown uses painfully obvious devices to fill the reader in on past events. Out of nowhere, a character remarks: "Did they ever prove that Cassius Rife killed Cora's father?" One of the cast marries a Japanese man. He is apparently the only Japanese in town. No explanation is given of how he got there. When World War II breaks out, we hear that his wife bashes a Fed over the head with an umbrella when they come to take him away to an internment camp. He reappears later in the book, casually, and again no explanation is given...
...still reluctant to face the issue squarely. If the word "pure," when used by adherents of revolution, in effect means "barbarous," perhaps the best the world can hope for in its future political upheavals is a revolution that is as "corrupt" as possible. Such skewed values are, indeed, already rife in some quarters. During the 1960s, Mao's Cultural Revolution in China was admired by many leftist intellectuals in the West, because it was supposedly "pure"-particularly by contrast with the bureaucratic stodginess of the Soviet Union. Yet that revolution, as the Chinese are now beginning to admit, grimly...