Word: torpor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...ambitious martinet, and revealed 1917 savagery in microcosm: fixed infantry moving against armed fortifications, prey to flairs and automatic weapons; military structures staffed by lawyers at the trenches and deadwood aristocrats at the drafting-table; calls to duty and service which can't quell the fears of men in torpor. Kubrick stuck so truly and unobtrusively to his debunking overview that the irony of his "brotherhood of man" finish goes overlooked. True, a fraulein warbling a love-song reduces French soldiers to tears. But we know that their captain only gives them a moment, that the decimated ranks will soon...
Every morning and evening, five days a week, commuters to San Francisco take to their cars and turn the roads leading to the city's two big bridges into fume filled alleys of torpor and noise. Last week, discarding the usual answer of building more bridges, the state's division of Bay Toll Crossings acted to attract fewer cars. As an experiment, two lanes on the Bay Bridge from Oakland were reserved for cars carrying three or more riders. Such car pools pass through its toll booths free during morning rush hours; otherwise the daily 500 fare...
...alarm fire at 56 Mt. Auburn St. shattered the dull torpor of reading period last night. The fire, which a second deputy chief of the Cambridge Fire department described as "a tremendous amount of fire," burned out most of the inside of the dilapidated condemned wooden structure...
...raised a family but for his damning insecurities, Tully finds no personal tranquillity. He moves from job to job: tops onions and sacks nuts, hoes tomato fields with Negro migrants whose silent endurance confounds and defeats him. At the end of his labors, he is no farther from torpor than when he started. The Stockton park even cuts down the shade trees under which laborers sleep in the evening heat. With irony too strong to be humorous, Tully comes closest to nature while watching a nudist colony skin-flick in a half-filled burlesque hall; by story...
...truth comes out shortly after Rivers returns to the Midwest to give a lecture. He stumbles off the stage in a drunken torpor, bashes his head and ends up recuperating in his old room at Mrs. Wallop's. She not only takes very effective charge of Rivers' recovery but also manages his love life and press relations. He in turn tells her that the harpy of his novel is really meant to be his own mother...