Word: wigged
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Scrupulously observing the note on the door, nurses at the hospital did not discover until late the next morning that the man in Room No. 2 was missing. Instead of the frail, 105-lb. cancer patient, they found a wig and a pillow propped up in the rumpled bed. By that time, Herbert Kappler, 70, a notorious Nazi war criminal serving a life sentence in Italy, was long gone. He and his German wife Anneliese, 52, who had spirited him out in the suitcase, turned up in West Germany the same day and were believed to be safely ensconced...
LEWIS CARROLL, THE WASP IN A WIG: THE "SUPPRESSED" EPISODE OF THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS...
...Illustrator John Tenniel sent his author a letter of complaint. "Don't think me brutal," he wrote, "but I am bound to say that the 'wasp' chapter doesn't interest me in the least." He found that depicting an insect with a golden wig was "altogether beyond the appliances of art." Reluctantly, Lewis Carroll expunged the episode of the wasp from his manuscript of Through the Looking Glass. For more than a century even scholars assumed that the chapter was lost or destroyed -until 1974, when an inconspicuous entry appeared in the London catalogue of Sotheby...
...still, whenever I appear They hoot at me and call me "Pig!" And that is why they do it, dear, Because I wear a yellow wig...
...double-entendres soon begin. Whenever Alice encounters a creature, the reader can hear a pun drop. The wasp, for example, mistakes Alice for a bee because she has a comb. Typically, wordploy is incessant, and terror lurks just beneath the surface. At one point the wasp takes off his wig and stretches out one claw toward Alice "as if he wished to do the same for her." "The cutting off of hair," writes Gardner, "like decapitation and teeth extraction, is a familiar Freudian symbol of castration. Interesting interpretations of this will surely be forthcoming from psychoanalytically oriented critics...