Word: wits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...suddenly snuffed out, but he does make some good guesses about how they exist. The dynamos run down, the reservoirs run dry, the cigarettes go flat and the canned goods lose their flavor, yet The Tribe cannot find the patience or the seed to keep a garden, nor the wit to catch a cow. The children scarcely learn to read, and soon begin to think of the vanished Americans as a race of gods...
...favorable)--regional dishes like roast suckling pig, and eggs "al flamenca" with typical sauces and spices were cheap and delicious. Few visitors missed keen Jai-alai games (a Basque invention, Jai-alai and pelota, which resemble squash, are two of the world's swiftest, most exhausting sports). The sparkling wit of the decadent Spanish theater commences evenings at 11 as do most films. The most spectacular events, however, beside peasant flestas, were the colorful bullfights put on in large arenas every Sunday...
Said Langer: "I ask unanimous consent that I be permitted to sit while making my speech." There was no objection, and he sat. He crossed his legs, tilted back in his chair, laughed at his own attempts at wit, providing a spectacle without parallel in senatorial history. It was a shabby show...
...Wit, No Sparkle. Burdick had expected that debates at the Oxford Union would be brilliant occasions in which "wildly precocious youths, their eyes firmly fixed on the main chance in Parliament, debate with cruelly deflating epigrams and puncture windy arguments with sly thrusts." The union would be a "symbol of English upper-class intellectual ability; disenchanted, shrewd, sophisticated, always witty." Actually, he decided, the union was full of stuttering youths, "red-faced with effort ... It is not witty. It does not sparkle...
...long suffered from tuberculous hemorrhages. One day in 1849 ne was visited by a former schoolmate, a priest, who found his face "cold as alabaster . . . Bubbling with wit and exceedingly kind, he seemed to belong only in slight degree to earth. But, alas, he was not thinking of heaven." Chopin told his friend, "I should not like to die without having received the sacrament, because I don't want to bring grief to my mother. But I cannot take it, because I don't understand it in your...