Word: twitch
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...autobiography). When he was five, Joseph Conrad took him into the garden and taught him to sail a boat ("the sail was a . . . sheet tied . . . to a clothes prop . . . The green grass heaved in waves . . . our speed was terrific"). Novelist Ford Madox Ford showed him how to "twitch one ear without moving the other"; he went for a drive "accompanied by Henry James riding a bicycle," and a man named Jack Galsworthy, who had bookish aspirations, taught him to keep his head when others all about were losing theirs, by taking charge at the Garnett home when the Garnett puppy...
...phase of Bennington's progressive system which creates an uneasy twitch among the students is the lack of grades. To one steeped in the progressive line this is no discomfiture, but a girl who arrives from a conventional school tends to feel unsure of her progress, at least for the first year. Marks are kept by the administration for use only in cases of transfer...
...true to his wife, a devoted father, and a hard worker at his lead business. Then, of a sudden, pretty women who had never wasted a glance on Raoul Cerusier began to look at him with every sign of intense interest. Without his having felt so much as a twitch, Raoul's face had suddenly changed into a handsome, sensitive one-the face...
...agony of patience," he writes. "At the thousandth bate in a day, on an arm that ached to the bone . . . merely to twitch him gently back to the glove . . . to reassure him with tranquillity, when one yearned ... to pound, pash, dismember!" After three days and three nights, the hawk fell asleep. The next day he was as wild as ever...
...shuffle he used for a walk, it would leave the audience strangling. Because nowadays he seldom moves from the high stool he sits on during broadcasts, the buzzardy shuffle is gone. But the rest of the delivery is still there, as good or better than ever: the perfectly timed twitch of the brows; the play of the luminous brown eyes?now rolling with naughty thoughts, now staring through the spectacles with only half-amused contempt; the acidulous, faint smile; the touch of fuming disgust in the voice ("That's as shifty an answer as I ever heard") ; above...