Word: wail
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Every Friday at noon from Cairo to Karachi, the thin nasal wail of muezzins crying, "There is no God but Allah," calls the faithful to the salat al-jami, the obligatory Friday service. The devout shutter their shops, rush through a thorough washing, and hurry into the mosque. Clad in dignity and finery, the imam ascends the pulpit, murmurs "salaam alei-kum," recites a text from the Koran, and begins a sermon which rarely lasts more than 20 minutes. So it has been for centuries...
Five minutes later, Sidney Bechet (rhymes with say-hey) was onstage, looking the man of distinction in his pinstripe suit and flashing diamond ring. He pointed the business end of his straight soprano saxophone at the rafters and let its penetrating tone wail out. With the unsophisticated beat of the born Dixie-lander and the heart-rending inflections of one who has known the blues, Bechet played favorite tunes, e.g., Sunny Side of the Street, My Man, Big Chief. The crowd roared approval and the critics agreed. "His accents . . . touched me deeply by their simple humanity, as if they came...
Until last fall, Spokane's official air-raid siren was a 10? plastic gadget hanging on a hook in the police radio room. The idea was to broadcast its thin wail to the squad cars, which in turn would sound their sirens. Since then, Spokane has acquired three new Chrysler airhorns...
...Advocate, however, leads strongly. In "The Education of Jem" by Peter Pitts, the author characterizes Jem, a somewhat brutish farmer, unable to tolerate the crying of his infant son. While Jem is caressing the child's head in a fatherly fashion, the baby begins to wail and what was gentle fondling becomes a severe enough rubbing to kill the infant. Pitts has the ability to convert the discontinuous ramblings of a man's thought into readable and convincing prose. His first paragraph on the hypnotic effect of a gate scraping back and forth along the ground and, later, the section...
...North Pole. As soon as the letters hit the tabloids some of the labeled ladies set up a wail. "If he means me, he's a liar," said Mrs. Richard Durant in Honolulu, "and I'll sue him from here to the North Pole." In Hollywood Mrs. Robert Howard (Actress Andrea Leeds) was' wide-eyed. "How could anyone think he could mean me?" she asked. "After all, there are lots of Mrs. Robert Howards . . . When my darling husband read the papers he said to me, 'But I didn't know you were a Democrat...