Word: unwritten
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gogol. The author tells of the commissar who had to put a stop to patriotic letters denouncing offenders against the regime because his office could not handle the flow. She notes Stalin's surprise phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask the author of the yet unwritten Dr. Zhivago just how good a poet Mandelstam was. Pasternak cautiously digressed and then suggested that he and Stalin meet for a chat. "About what?" asked the voice from the Kremlin. "About life and death," replied Pasternak. Stalin hung...
P.O.W. Offer. Viet Nam is not the only place where the elastic nature of unwritten diplomatic "understandings" has been demonstrated. Washington and Moscow reached such an understanding over Cuba after the 1962 missile crisis: no more nuclear weapons in Cuba, no U.S. invasion of the island (see THE WORLD). The flexible nature of the agreement was apparent at the Nixon press conference when he said that a Russian submarine base at Cienfuegos, where nuclear subs presumably could be serviced, does not constitute a threat to the U.S. One of the shorter-lived understandings led to the Middle East cease-fire...
According to Procopio, the unwritten law of Harvard Square's newspaper dealers is made by Sheldon Cohen, owner of "Out of Town Newspapers, Inc." Procopio charged yesterday that Cohen's dislike for competitors has been the source of many of their troubles. "We are pennies compared to Cohen but he gets so uptight about us. We don't understand...
There are moments like these in the stories when Oates is simply too clever, too conscious of being a writer. More often, her tyranny relaxes into an awesome demonstration of control. One of the most remarkable stories in the collection is a series of "Unmailed, Unwritten Letters," conceived by a young woman to be sent to her parents, husband, and lover, also his wife and daughter, a genius who at six wrote "tidy, little poems like Blake's." The sense of desperateness and guilt that these letters evoke taints the final fragment to her lover with an almost ghoulish bitterness...
Among the unwritten rules: people moving on sidewalks, like vehicles moving on roadways, should keep to the right;* elderly citizens have the right of way over their youngers; deference is also due cripples, couples and tourists, such as somebody meandering across the pavement to photograph the Empire State Building. (Wolff is uncertain whether women are accorded the right of way over men, but these days that question might have less to do with sidewalk standards than with the feminist revolution...