Word: torpid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...three months since its sudden, savage coup against the ruling Arab minority, once-torpid Zanzibar has become an island of fear. Bands of tough government cops, armed with Russian-supplied burp guns, prowl the land in search of "enemies of the state." Hundreds of Arabs have been marched off their property by African land-grabbers; more than 2,000 prisoners are crammed into hastily built detention camps...
...other leads below the elementary school syntax and semantic void which Jonesco's characters utter to the recognition that what makes sense in and of this play is the tone of voice, namely boredom. Not only do the player's voices range systematically from torpid boredom to orgiastic boredom; their words do, too. Nearly every sentence is, by itself, a cliche. Juxtaposed, the frightening novelty of the message of cliches suggests that novel messages are no more than cliches, artfully rearranged. Thus the characters--they too are not individuals, but cliches--break down their own messages and shout the ultimate...
...smiles wistfully. He has done his duty, he has built a bridge to the future. His children will cross it, he will not. He will stay in the past, bound there by affection, by habit, by sloth, by congenital dislike of tomorrow, by the siren lure of a torrid, torpid land that makes its children long "voluptuously for death." As the film ends he kneels and, yearning upward to the morning star, prays passionately for death: "O faithful star! When will you give me an appointment less ephemeral than this...
...Mitchum, 22, has progressed through bit parts to star billing in Carl Foreman's The Victors. He is a heavy-lidded, torpid replica of Actor Robert Mitchum, but with little of his father's suggestion of latent energy and smoldering violence...
...National Academy of Sciences. Other nations prize art on stamps; Mexico has for decades used striking and sometimes beautiful work. But only with Postmaster General J. Edward Day has the U.S. strayed so radically from the more usual practice of using the department's own generally competent, occasionally torpid designers; in 1961 the department reproduced a painting by Frederic Remington and in 1962 one by Winslow Homer. National Gallery Director John Walker persuaded Day to try a live artist this year, got Art News magazine to give $500 to each of the contestants chosen to enter. The five artists...