Word: shriek
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...solitary on stage, stands staring through a piece of rectangular plastic, a small, open circle rounded by red at its center. He falls backward, rigid, his body hitting the ground so hard it raises clouds of dust and makes a sound like a dull detonation. A siren starts to shriek. It could be a warning, or a summons...
...What Rocks!" the Hoya fans shriek, "What Rocks!" This is the literal translation of the school's motto, "Hoya Saxa." The people in Henle 20 with the Harvard student didn't shriek that, or much of anything, until the second half of Saturday's game. What did it was an inbound pass by Gene Smith, accompanied by a grim and an unmistaka- ble nationally televised wink right into the cumeras...
Some sentimentalists, of course, think of heckling as a democratic dialogue, a roughhewn give-and-take of language. But it can turn strident and ultimately sinister. The shriek from the floor can become a different medium altogether. It turns into street theater. Anarchy crashes the hall, like a motorcycle leaping through the window and blasting down the aisle toward the podium. The sound is an anti-language, a gust of obliterating noise from below that is designed precisely to subvert the process whereby words arrive as ideas at their destination in people's brains...
...shrouded in brown blankets by volunteer civil defense and Red Cross workers, wearing gas masks against the stench and rubber gloves to fend off the toxins from the decaying flesh. Frantic clusters of Palestinians gathered around the rigid, pathetic bundles. From time to time, one of the onlookers would shriek in horror, catching sight of the distorted features of a friend or family member. At one point, a woman torn by grief stood over one of the bloated corpses waving a scarf and a handful of personal letters. "Yi, yi, are you my husband?" she screamed. "My God, who will...
...high at 5 a.m., the air already very hot. The day begins with a spurt of machine-gun fire and a shriek in the street, followed by a low moaning. One learns that these sounds are normal. Late yesterday afternoon, a car bomb exploded a few blocks from the hotel, killing two, shooting a gray-white pillar of smoke into the sky, which turned black before vanishing. Destruction is everywhere. An apartment house on a corner is cracked in the middle like a bone. It sags and heaves. Fragments of cement and wire hang from the structure at impossible angles...