Word: spider
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...worked a cure. The modern medical name for it is tarantism, after the wild Italian folk dance, the tarantella. The Italians have a common belief that the tarantella drives out the poison of a tarantula's bite by causing perspiration, and that the dance was named for the spider. Actually, both dance and spider were named for the city of Taranto, which was hit hard by the dancing mania...
Spend an afternoon in the charming, alcoholic atmosphere of this scientific ivory-tower of zoological knowledge. Pore through a few of its beautifully bound editions on the "sex-life of the mollusk" or "strange customs of the Chinese spider." The reward is boundless; the effort minute...
Since September 1940 sick, shelved President Ortiz had sat in his darkened mansion on the Calle Suipacha like a weakening but stubbornly weaving spider. He can make little; but he can prevent much. A 16-insulin-unit-per-day diabetic, with one eye permanently blind, the other four-fifths blacked out by diabetic cataract, he cannot control, but will not let go of, Argentine politics. The much he can prevent is a unanimous Government-bloc support to Acting President Ramon S. Castillo's policy of refusing belligerent collaboration with the Allies. Between President Ortiz and ex-President Agustin...
...must learn to loathe every Japanese boy and girl who gather rice in the fields, or go without food so that the yellow army can bomb our shores. It is the people, the customs, the culture,--every least part of the Japanese civilization that is symbolized by a spider or an octopus in the cartoons which decorate the editorial pages of our city newspapers...
Industrious and endowed with a spider's timing for the coup de grâce, Aranha was the "strong man" of the 1930 revolution which put dumpy little Getulio Dornellas Vargas into power. As No. 1 man, Vargas has been an old-fashioned South American dictator with newfangled ideas patterned on the academic peasant-paced authoritarianism of Portugal...