Word: vermin
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...visceral sensation: the case of the body-snatchers Burke and Hare, as told in a story by Donald Taylor. In the last century, it seems, the teachers of anatomy in Edinburgh were forced to deal with "resurrectionists" for the dissection subjects they needed. Two of these "vicious human vermin of the gutters of the city" find it more convenient to murder than to dig up their stock in trade ready-killed, and familiar faces begin to show up on the dissecting tables, faces that had been seen alive, laughing and talking, a few hours previously...
They gave her the big buildup. In the first days of shooting she was photographed-in Technicolor, of course-peeping through the autumn foliage, splashing in her swimming pool, lounging in her penthouse, peeking roguishly from underneath the rumpled bedclothes. No doubt remembering the animated vermin that made such a popular success as Cinderella's coachman, Producer Disney surrounded her with plenty of cute little "real-life" mice. He also plumped up the supporting cast with the famous bunny brigade...
Impudent Husbands. In the provinces the situation is worse. "Unfortunate women, who are homeless, covered with vermin and filth, are selling their bodies for 5 to 20 zlotys [a zloty is 25?]." Poverty has driven many husbands to encourage their wives to prostitute themselves, and Lastik complains of "their impudence and shamelessness" because "they are certain of immunity in Poland...
...after day, in the shade of the great jacaranda tree outside the courthouse at Nyeri, an old woman squatted, moodily scratching the vermin beneath her filthy rags. Inside, on trial for his life before a British judge and a jury of three Kikuyu elders from his native village, was her son, Dedan Kimathi, 36, self-styled Field Marshal, Knight Commander of the African Empire, President of the Parliament of Kenya and Commander in Chief of the Land Liberation Army, the man once feared through all Kenya as the leader of some 10,000 Mau Mau terrorists...
...unsavory subject is a homosexual affair between a 13-year-old boy and his 30-year-old seducer, a gas-station attendant. Tesch borrows from Jones the neo-Dreiserian conviction that life itself is a four-letter word. Among Tesch's victims and vermin: a girl who commits incest and goes mad, a wife-beating lush, an aging sadistic homosexual. The most defenseless victim is the English language, e.g., "A pang of lonesomeness settled over him like a cold wet spray." Some might argue that Tesch was a born bad writer. But Gerald, an off-and-on Handy colonist...