Word: tora
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Japanese, who are among the world's politest people when sober, are notoriously violent when drunk. One word for a drunk in Japanese is tora-tiger. The police have been prohibited by the law from taming a tora unless he becomes overtly violent. Even then they could only politely take him into protective custody, put him in a paddy wagon whose walls were padded with foam rubber for his own protection, lock him up overnight, release him with a lecture in the morning. One remedial variation: tape-recording his drunken expostulations, then playing the tape back to his glowering...
...hopeless as that, though many Greeks felt the way the captain did. The Greek Army, on its part, was learning the phrase which Major Ehrgott and the other Americans liked to use: "Oxi avrio-tora!" (Not tomorrow-now!). The Americans were learning, well before the spring thaws opened up the whole north Greece guerrilla country, that the military solution to the Andartes would involve more than night patrols...
...schoolchildren wrote to the zoo keepers to say that the slaughter of their animals constituted "unbearable acts of indignity." To console them, the keepers had the beasts stuffed and reinstalled in their cages or in glass showcases. In death as in life the zoo's star attraction was Tora San, the huge tiger. Propped up before a painted backdrop of lush green jungle, his bared fangs sent many a moppet scurrying closer to his mother's kimono...
...Recently Tora San suffered another act of indignity. Thieves broke into his cage, stripped off his skin from tail to ears. Tokyo's police thought that the remains of Tora San were well on their way to becoming tiger-skin wallets. Last week police found a tiger's head, placed it in Tora San's cage. But keepers and children (who know their tigers) indignantly insisted that the new head was not Tora San's. This one had been ripped off somebody...
When he was found after a long hunt it was in no mountain hideout, no rebel garret, no desert shack-but in the toils of a wealthy and voluptuous Hollywood has-been, Lia Tora by name. Last week Senhor Valverde was back in jail, with a probable 17-year hard-labor sentence (instead of the previous eight and one-half) before him. Also in jail, charged with furnishing him asylum, was pretty Lia Tora. And Brazil's men of justice were scratching their heads over what hard labor to set her soft, shapely arms a-doing for a possible...