Word: thumb
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Italian is one language in which a deaf-mute is not completely lost. Every facial tic, every finger flick, means something. A thumb jabbed at the mouth: "Waiter, bring some wine." A semi-rotating hand with thumb and forefinger up: "No can do." One raised finger: "Probably." Palm open: "Probably not." Tapping the center of the forehead: "Do you think I'm stupid?" Extended fingers slowly rubbing the underchin: "I couldn't care less...
...every prudent Italian knows, it is perfectly legal and frequently necessary to fold the middle fingers back under the thumb and jab the first and little fingers down at the ground. Such "horns" ward off evil spirits. But if the fingers point upward? Ah, the corna instantly sneers that the addressee is a cuckold. The gesture is so unbearable that in Verona recently a truck driver was fined $50 and court costs for understandably lofting the corna at a madly beeping motorist...
Lucy's little tousle-haired brother Linus is the strip's intellectual, but he is thrown into a tizzy whenever he loses his security blanket. "Sucking your thumb without a blanket," he confides, "is like eating a cone without ice cream." Linus is Horatio Alger in reverse: "No problem is so big or so complicated that it cannot be run away from." Snoopy, the dog with the floppy ears and foolish smile, is the perfect hedonist. He dances, skates, jumps rope, hunches like a vulture but above all likes to lie flat on his back...
...with a country as with a person, 'What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?' " The emotion took hold; the Texas twang rose and billowed. He smiled beatifically, sighed sarcastically, frowned fiercely: he pursed his lips, jerked his thumb, clenched his fists, reasoned, cajoled, commanded. No section of the U.S.. said Johnson, should "look with prideful righteousness on the troubles in another section," for "there is no Negro problem. There is no Southern problem. There is no Northern problem. There is only an American problem." This brought...
...missed his hunting dog. Of the 140 who stayed, only ten showed little or no improvement in their 3-R skills. The progress of 55 boys was classed as "extremely positive." McAndrew reports that "the vast majority" grew in "poise and responsiveness." A retiring 14-year-old with a thumb-sucking habit turned into a conversational leader. Wrote one mother about her son: "It seems hardly possible how much he has matured. He has found himself." Says Student Dewey Long: "The teachers here explain a subject so that I can understand it. There were lots of things I never...