Word: vaines
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...telephoned their surrender from a bar in a Boston suburb. And after 33 hours of freedom, the self-styled Strangler was captured, wearing a sailor's uniform, in a clothing store in Lynn, 40 miles from the hospital. There was no struggle, and DeSalvo, who had pleaded in vain for psychiatric help, said plaintively: "Maybe now they'll believe it's a mental condition...
...front page day after day, New Yorkers have begun to think anew about taxis. Complaints that drivers are rude, ignore hails and refuse to take Negroes to Harlem are familiar: the police department gets 500 of them per month. What New Yorkers really wonder about, as they try in vain to get a cab during rush hour or rainstorm, is whether or not cabs are becoming scarcer...
Poking the Foibles. One of his most satiric series was his dozen oils of Hu-dibras, the central figure in Samuel Butler's scathing poem on puritanical hypocrisy. Hudibras was ignorant, conceited, preachy, distempered, vain-a cocksure jackass. Butler used him to poke fun at reformers, and so did Hogarth...
...vain. Inevitable, inexorable, creeps forward the tide of men's despair in this petty world of fact ("There was a flood in Boston in 835, maybe there will be again."). And all will be in vain forever, gurp, forever ("If it was 835 I wouldn't have to go on the unicycle to Revere Beach, I could drown in my room...
...castrati, who were paid four times as much as the other singers, up to 20 times as much as the composers. Some tenacious women singers masqueraded as castrati (which caused occasional -and embarrassing- sexual complications). When women were finally accepted on all opera stages in the early 1800s, the vain castrati resented the competition. The result was some classic vocal jousts. Castrato Domenico Caffarelli, for instance, liked to fluster the sopranos during duets by spiraling off on melodic tangents that had no resemblance to the score; Soprano Angelica Catalan!, while singing in England, tried to hold her own by tossing...