Word: swift
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...quickly as its hood is removed and the hawker releases the bird from his wrist. It promptly mounts to a height of perhaps half a mile, and "waits on" in circling flight above its owner until prey is flushed, whereupon the falcon dives to the attack in its incredibly swift stoop. It is not unusual for a peregrine 2,000 feet in the sky to get down and kill its quarry pigeon before the prey has traveled 100 yards. A breath-taking sight...
Inside this prosaic moral crust, the Anglo-Irish have always carried a defiant spirit. The high point of the Irish genius is reached in pure, disinterested destructiveness, and of that Shaw was the supreme intellectual embodiment in his time and the eager heir of Swift. It is important to note, however, that this destructiveness is mainly directed at sitting birds; the war of 1914 may have come at an awkward time in Shaw's life as an artist-he was 58-but once the world began to destroy itself, Shaw's destructiveness was outdone, he made crazy...
...last of the Victorian prophets, the last of the long line of young beards who became the great, bearded old gentlemen. Yet, in important ways, Shaw had no connection with the igth Century at all. He was really a man of the 18th Century, closer to Voltaire and Swift than to Marx and Morris. The Anglo-Ireland of 1856, when he was born, was an ossified 18th Century society. It was elegant yet genteel; it was ruled by the blistering aristocratic candor and the simple aristocratic naivety; it was naturally irreverent, as aristocratic societies are; it was libertine in word...
...remotely analyzing) football, accurate prediction of the possible outcome of a significant athletic encounter is, of course, made even more difficult by factors of which the observer is not aware until the exact moment that the contest commences: adverse weather, a driving rain, fro example, can transform a swift group of athletes into eleven separate amorphous masses, clumsiness incarnate; besides, good coaching, too, cannot be under-stressed, vital as it is in the transformation of a promising team into a team with great potential; spirit, that greatest of all abstractions, is, perhaps, most important of all, as Tolstoi himself well...
Against this array of speed, the Crimson had only swift tailback Lou Tsavaris, plus the short, hard passing of Bill Kierstead...