Word: withers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...writhed/ under the crunch of bloodstained boots,/ under the wheels of Black Marias." Life under Lenin's current successor has relaxed, grown somewhat less bleak, but there still seems no prospect that the mythology will be fulfilled: that, in the fullness of time, the state will begin to wither away and leave only the classless, abundant workers' paradise. On the contrary, the stolid bureaucracy expands, reduplicating itself and its controls. The Revolution's promises seem doomed always to recede into the future...
...easy courses proliferate, classes in the harder subjects wither away. Calculus and Russian, two post-Sputnik specialties, are extinct. Only 35 students are braving physics this year. Few kids prefer the nononsense, four-year algebra-geometry-algebra-trigonometry sequence to the simpler math courses. The attrition rate in foreign languages is so great that after the first year, students in higher courses are combined in one class. High-ability kids are not taking high-level courses," says Accounting Teacher James Whitty. The students ask: Why should we?" The school's course brochure advises college-preparatory students that they "should make...
...Gorky, Soviet Christians cry out for more churches Marxism may teach that religion must wither away, but the state is forever trying to help the process along. Though the new constitution, like the old, "recognizes" religious liberty in the U.S.S.R., the government decides exactly how many churches can stay open. Today there are only 7,500 Russian Orthodox churches, a tenth as many as before the 1917 Revolution, and 1,000 of these are not, in fact, in operation...
...Irish Rovers on the juke box, and a suspicious tendency to switch channels when the Irish Spring commercials come on the T.V. Maybe that says something about the Cambridge inebriate set, which apparently has no appreciation of the value of good talk and a friendly atmosphere in which to wither one's brain cells. Obviously a sad case...
...Doth Not Wither...