Word: screech
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sank to a new low and a new horde overran Mallorca: U. S. hard-drinkers who wanted to live like characters in a novel by Ernest Hemingway. They set up their own bars in Mallorca's famed caves. They started a fad of imitating a peacock's screech, slept all day, screeched like peacocks all night. Tourist prices began to skid upward. Travel publicity brought new thousands of law-abiding U. S. tourists, many of whom stayed to open their own shops, restaurants, travel bureaus and pensions...
This condemnation from a hard-boiled politician of the Tammany stripe sent the Roosevelt crowd into a rage. Shrieked Senator Long: "Just the funeral march? the last screech of defeat! All Frank Hague knows is the road to Manhattan...
...sleepless roar that throbs across the city's zoo, rises every night a roar of animal voices, voices from Africa and Asia, from the polar ice, the plains of Tanganyika, the primeval forests of Borneo. Lions groan and tigers moan. Elephants trumpet like thunder. Wolves howl, hyenas laugh, monkeys screech. But all cry the same thing: "How long must we remain captive? What have we done that we should suffer so horribly? Why are we here? Why?" Sleepy humans do not answer, do not even hear...
...York's prodigious crash-bang-rattle-screech, in the estimation of Health Commissioner Shirley Wilmott Wynne, engenders juvenile neuroses. The city's Noise Abatement Commission has found classrooms in nearly one-third of the public schools so din-ridden as to be virtually useless. In its researches the Commission (which does no actual abating but carries on investigations of noise) uses the "decibel," which measures differences between sounds and absolute silence. One decibel represents a sound just audible. Ten decibels make one "bel" (named for the late Inventor Alexander Graham Bell), which represents roughly the amount of sound...
Three acts of Aunt Lottie are too much. Her voice, like the screech of a truck's brakes, has not only the rest of the cast but the entire audience squirming with the desire to get hands on her throat. But no one who has ever possessed an Aunt Lottie will say she is an exaggeration. Able Actress Lowell, with able support, even makes plausible the few moments when she is pitiable. Brisk if undistinguished dialog helps the play; a farcical ending hurts it. It is a fine play for everyone's Aunt Lottie...