Word: viper
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With mounting amazement, the anthropologists drove through the silent streets between crumbling mosques, forts and palaces. They found no footprints, no campfire ashes, no signs that modern men had ever entered the place. The only living creature they saw was a desert viper...
...attention-for "these curiosities," he said, "would be quite forgotten, did not such idle fellows as me putt them downe." From old Dr. William Harvey, who had discovered the circulation of the blood, Aubrey got eyewitness accounts of Sir Francis Bacon, whose eye was "like the eie of a viper." Izaak Walton regaled him with anecdotes about the young bricklayer named Ben Jonson who went to Cambridge and died court poet; from an ancient servant he heard of the historic day when Sir Walter Raleigh, fresh from the New World, threw the ladies into fits by puffing a pipe...
Said Churchill: "It was only . . . when all the [German] preparations being made on the coasts of France and Holland could be examined in detail . . . that we knew how grave had been the peril. . . . Only just in time did the Allied armies blast the viper in his nest. Otherwise the autumn of 1944 . . . might well have seen London as shattered as Berlin...
...anxious to add the ruin of himself. The news of his death caused friends to remember the days when, as he confessed in his autobiographical The Street I Know, he made a career of drink and an occupation out of borrowing money. Remembering the stir caused by his symposium, viper-tongued critics would say: "There goes American civilization-in the gutter...
...been experimenting with the drug as an aid in curing opium addiction. In the world of hot jazz, marijuana's relatively benign effects are attested by long experience. Lushes often die young from cirrhosis of the liver or apoplexy, often spend their final days in delirium tremens. But vipers frequently live on to enjoy old age. In You Rascal You, a viper addresses an imaginary lush : "I'll be standing on the corner high when they bring your body...