Word: twist
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...Boston executive, prep-school boy, Harvard grad, a Navy ensign (like Mister Roberts' Pulver). From the start he was a master of comic timing, of the buttoned-down double take. That flummoxed look paired nicely with his ricochet vocal rhythms--he'd race through phrases, then put a twist on the crucial word. Unlike most other Hollywood actors, who relax and seem to bathe in their star quality, Lemmon worked hard. He let you read his reading of the character. His acting was less about being than about doing...
Puppeteer Basil Twist In his Symphonie Fantastique, he dunked pieces of cloth in a giant aquarium and made them dance to Berlioz. Were it not for mimes, he would get beaten up daily...
Wilson knows how to tell a story and how to twist odd sounds out of her throat, which gives the impression that the emotion is so strong it cannot be held in place by a voice or a note. Above all, she doesn't sound like a child or some jaded hussy given to parading self-denigration as a false form of honesty. In her brown beauty, she is a fully grown woman who has high command of the rhythm called swing, which can easily be defined as the sound of the pursuit of happiness...
Sure, it's uplifting to read about John Adams and the Founding Fathers, or those daring exploits of the Greatest Generation during World War II. But they also serve who only twist the screws--as you'll learn from One Good Turn, a history of the humble screwdriver. It's just one of a spate of oddball history books that eschew the grand and the momentous in favor of the small, the prosaic and the overlooked. Recently we've seen or will soon see histories of, among other things, salt, the ostrich, New York City sewage, flattery...
...will be a public execution with a familiar postmodern twist: we will be watching not the execution but the watching of the execution. (Unless someone bootlegs video of the closed-circuit broadcast, which the networks say they will not air - unless, of course, someone else does, in which case it will instantly become news.) But this kind of metaspectacle can be powerful. The last official public execution, in 1936, became the last of its kind precisely because of media attention, not to the hanging itself - of a 22-year-old black man convicted of rape and murder in Owensboro...