Word: twig
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...spartan but crowded children's ward at the Church of Scotland Hospital in KwaZulu-Natal, a tiny, staring child lies dying. She is three and has hardly known a day of good health. Now her skin wrinkles around her body like an oversize suit, and her twig-size bones can barely hold her vertical as nurses search for a vein to take blood. In the frail arms hooked up to transfusion tubes, her veins have collapsed. The nurses palpate a threadlike vessel on the child's forehead. She mews like a wounded animal as one tightens a rubber band around...
...itself. Between (say) the bricks, the cinder blocks and the parallel stripes on one hand and (say) the gilded statue of General Sherman on horseback at the corner of Central Park by Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the other, a vast gulf of experience is fixed. Even if viewers twig that the artist has generous and even noble intentions, it is idle to suppose that anything will persuade them that the stripes come within a mile of the Sherman, let alone have some evolutionary edge over it merely because they appear 70 years farther down the history of art. For though...
...been a lean, mean, pop culture machine. (Don't you love fat babies? You can knock them over and they'll stay there for days!) Actually, every one is holding their breath in anticipation because my mom has been a toothpick since birth and my dad started out a twig and got his healthy gut around age 20 or 21. So it's 50-50-am I gonna be a size 30 waist and have a flat stomach forever? Or will I finally get to buy an extra large T-shirt and drink a beer without getting full? My grandfather...
...want them, and if they returned to Rwanda, they feared Tutsi would seek revenge for the genocide perpetrated by Hutu extremists just two years before. The landscape around the camp symbolized the prospects for the internees in it, scrubby hills that had been denuded of arboreal life, every twig and branch gathered for cooking-fire fuel. Yet Joseph still roamed the hills most days, seeking wood to sell for Tanzanian shillings that he could trade for precious food...
...famously miserable environment. How can we blame a six-year-old who has criminals as role models for his faulty moral compass? Good question. But will it be so much easier to blame him for being morally defective at 16, after another 10 years in that environment? As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined. ("A young child is even more open to cultural and family influence than an older kid," a psychologist told the New York Times. True. But older kids were once young--that is, when they got the firm dispositions, for good or ill, that later...