Word: spanishness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...makes the mosquito a formidable adversary, one that has caused no end of trouble for human beings. Malarial mosquitoes, some historians think, contributed to the fall of ancient Greece. Europeans of medieval times were tormented by the insect Chaucer knew as the midge; the English word mosquito, from the Spanish for "little fly," appeared in the 16th century, along with new and nastier New World species. In the 1880s the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, fresh from the triumph of building the Suez Canal, was utterly vanquished in his heroic effort to dig a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, partly...
...figures posing for Ray Ban sunglasses and drinking Evian water. And should the California torpedo fail, there would be ample backup on the U.S. team, including Tom Jager, the 1988 silver medalist who earns a living swimming against Biondi in exhibition races. Los tiburones yanqui -- the Yankee sharks -- the Spanish sportswriters dubbed them...
...most prominent country in the early going, however, had been one that did not march but made its presence felt at every turn: independent-minded Catalonia, which is determined to cast these as the Catalan, not the Spanish, Games. A longtime enemy of Castile, delighting in a language that Franco had banned, Barcelona was eager not just to show off its faster, higher, stronger ^ self -- reconstruction is almost as trendy as deconstruction here -- but to emphasize its distance from the Spain of myth, and of Madrid. FREEDOM FOR CATALONIA signs (in English) were draped from balconies and shoulders, and buttons...
...most enduring features of the city. On account of its lively plebian past, the city has always had something of a chip on its shoulder towards any centralized authority. And during much of the past 500 years, or ever since Phillip II established Madrid as the Spanish capital, much of Barcelona's ire has been directed towards her sister city sprawling in the middle of the peninsula's arid plains...
...Sagrada Familia (which is not a cathedral but an "expiatory temple" dedicated to the cult of the Holy Family) is Gaudi's best-known building, the logo of Barcelona as the Statue of Liberty is of New York City. Unfortunately, because most of its designs were lost in the Spanish Civil War, nobody knows how Gaudi would have finished it, and the newly completed sections look dead compared with the parts Gaudi supervised. The facade sculptures by Josep Subirachs are particularly inert and vulgar. They seem to epitomize the moment when the religious art of Catholic Europe died for want...