Word: shriek
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Madame Bovary of the wheat elevators, was the archetype of a million repressed U.S. small-town men & women. Even readers who detested Carol Kennicott as much as her Gopher Prairie neighbors did were attracted by her husband, solid, plodding long-suffering Dr. Will Kennicott. Main Street was a shriek against the standardized smugness of U.S. life and a coo of satisfaction that it was so solidly smug...
...resonant stone vault. Its occupant has died before your eyes, but you can't be too sure, for she was subject to cataleptic trances. After the pallbearers have gone, the camera coldly, tenderly approaches the coffin in a silence so intense as to be almost unbearable. When the shriek of the prematurely buried woman finally comes, it releases the rest of the show into a free-for-all masterpiece of increasing terror...
...personal visit of the head to a class will be an annual event, accompanied by all the ceremonial of a present-time speech day. A tube railway will be needed to connect its sixth-form rooms with the nearest university. The marvelous efficiency of such a school will shriek to high heaven and yet-right glad am I to think that a beneficent providence has ensured that I shall not be called upon to act as the smallest cog in its gargantuan machinery...
...aboard during the Channel crossing. His calm description of the scene was accompanied by the sound of the ship's ack-ack guns, the gunfire from nearby ships,'the calling of all hands to General Quarters, the excited comments of the gun crew making their first kill, the hurt shriek of a wounded German plane diving toward the worried waters of the Channel. Excerpts...
...would pop into sight with a squealing shriek that sent some groundlings dashing for shelter, sure that a heavy bomb was screaming down near by. As it whisked overhead the sound changed to something like "a giant whistling teakettle on the boil." It disappeared over the far horizon before you could say "knife." After a while, neighborhood people got used to it, even gave it a nickname: "The Squirt...