Word: thump
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Gogol had once said it was his duty to "die with a song on his lips." In fact he died at 42 in a barbarous nightmare of half-savage Russian medicine, with leeches on his famous nose and mad medics trying to thump the devil out of him. Gogol had a strange power over the Russian mind. Says Biographer Magarshack in a just summary: "This conviction . . . that it was his transcendental mission to save Russia, an idea that was completely divorced from reality . . . was the tragedy of his life." Yet, in a sense, though Gogol could not save...
...Germans. But being a Croatian peasant who treasured freedom and hated authority, he had no use for Tito's postwar Communist dictatorship. On the inevitable night in 1949 when Tito's secret police came after him, Carmelo and his younger brother Emil fled to Trieste, only a thump ahead of the knock at the door. From their haven just across the border, Carmelo and Emil set up an overland express, guiding Yugoslavs to freedom. Before the year was out, Tito's agents had jailed Carmelo's mother and sister back home, and shot Emil dead...
...sparkle of George Bernard Shaw to the gurgle of Al Capp (see color pages). Despite the absence this season of such magic names as Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein, the box-office boom for a show with a lilting tune and a hearty joke has continued to thump as loudly as ever...
Humbling Vote. When the votes were counted, no one had won a majority- thus requiring this week's runoff-but several had been humbled. The Communists, who before Hungary could count on one vote in every four in France, had dropped with an embarrassing thump from 130,000 votes to a modest 60,000. Pierre Mendès-France, who had staked his struggle to "revitalize and rejuvenate" the Radicals on the outcome, suffered a crushing defeat...
...long stretch to Hopper, without getting the least response, and finally blurted: "Oh hell, peekaboo!" Even Mrs. Hopper (who does the family's share of talking) confesses that "sometimes talking with Eddie is just like dropping a stone in a well, except that it doesn't thump when it hits bottom...