Word: short
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Paris -- perhaps even in all France -- who had stood the longest time in just one place." This suits Jonathan fine. His childhood was disagreeably eventful: both parents disappeared during World War II. As a young man, he was pressured into the army and then into an unsuitable, short-lived marriage. Since then, he has carefully constructed a hermetic existence designed to protect himself from all surprises. His plan works, until the morning he discovers a pigeon staring at him in the hallway outside his attic room. The protagonist of German Author Patrick Suskind's second novel seems as commonplace...
...studio audience at the Tonight show in Burbank is strangely silent, staring intently at the proceedings on the stage. A shirtless volunteer lies face up on a table, behind which stands a short, balding man with a fringe of white hair, a bushy beard and piercing green eyes. He kneads the exposed abdomen with both hands, presses one thumb down and draws it across the skin. A trickle, then a stream of blood appears. The audience gasps. Now his hand thrusts into the abdomen and, accompanied by a sickening squishing sound, pulls up a clump of bloody tissue. Host Johnny...
...lilting, halting, and political questions are turned aside for fear of reprisals back home. Five minutes before curtain, a hush falls over the backstage. They gather for a nightly ritual, heads bent in prayer. Soft voices rise and fall in a Zulu chant. In the corridor, band members stop short and bow their heads. The doorman, a flush-cheeked Irishman, respectfully removes his cap. "I've never seen this kind of dedication," he murmurs...
Punctuation, in short, gives us the human voice, and all the meanings that lie between the words. "You aren't young, are you?" loses its innocence when it loses the question mark. Every child knows the menace of a dropped apostrophe (the parent's "Don't do that" shifting into the more slowly enunciated "Do not do that"), and every believer, the ignominy of having his faith reduced to "faith." Add an exclamation point to "To be or not to be . . . " and the gloomy Dane has all the resolve he needs; add a comma, and the noble sobriety...
...freedom to move to the colonial metropolis of Sydney, where she buys one of the first things she sees, the Prince Rupert's Glassworks. Lucinda's purchase is not entirely impulsive; she has already come under the spell of glass, with the conviction "that it is invisible, solid, in short, a joyous and paradoxical thing, as good a material as any to build a life from." The unconventional young factory owner soon finds another obsession in the freewheeling world of Sydney: the joy of playing cards in particular and of gambling in general...