Word: rubes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...virtuous cosmetologist (Bernadette Peters), who plays cornet solos to express her love. He makes and loses a great pile of money, and eventually is rescued from drunken bumdom by his black parents, who are now rich from the money he has been sending home. The rube role works fairly well when Martin remembers to play a harmless nitwit of the Jerry Lewis variety. But that really is not his kind of humor. During most of this film he is way out of character (so is his rough language). He does not impersonate a rube or a lovable nitwit; his twitchy...
...idioms used by 40% of twins because they feel lonely or playful or both. Twins usually give it up at age three. But Gracie and Ginny were discovered at six, still unable to speak English. They had an apparent vocabulary of hundreds of exotic words stuck together in Rube Goldberg sentence structures and salted with strange half-English and half-German phrases. The preposition out became an active verb: "I out the pudatoo-ta" (I throw out the potato salad). Potato could be said in 30 different ways. Linguists, speech pathologists and educators hoped the twins' private communication would...
...although some agree with the Republicans that it would allow an unwarranted intrusion by the Government into hospital affairs. The G.O.P. also sees the bill as a wedge to open the way for price controls in other industries. Contends Republican Congressman David Stockman of Michigan: "It is a classic Rube Goldberg legislative contraption that will be impossible to implement and virtually make Califano the hospital czar...
Propellers? The swanboats, heaven forbid, aren't powered by engine. But there are propellers, turned by young men strapped into bicycle-like setups in the rear of the boats. And in case the boat sounds like some Rube Goldberg get-up, rest assured that all the machinery is hidden inside a giant wooden swan that sits really at the stern...
...plumbing goes, nuclear power plants exceed Rube Goldberg's wildest fantasies. The basic idea sounds simple-unstable heavy atoms, like those of uranium 235, break up (fission). Scattered in all directions are electrically neutral particles called neutrons as well as fission products such as shortlived radioactive xenon, krypton and iodine. The neutrons hit still other atoms like errant billiard balls in a chain reaction that produces heat. But obtaining useful energy from this process can be extremely complex. Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant has two pressurized water reactors. Such reactors are based on a design pioneered...