Word: woodenness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Nowhere is the misery of Angola's civil war more palpable than in the provincial capital of Huambo. Lavender-blossomed jacaranda trees line the streets, but many buildings are pockmarked by shellfire and bullets. At a health center, one-legged children push themselves on wooden trolleys while waiting for fresh supplies of artificial limbs. Most became amputees the same way as Fernando Segunda, 16: his right leg was blown off when he stepped on a land mine...
...contrast to such hyperpituitary passages, On the Waves opens with a comparatively terse Venetian scene: "In the churning wake of a motorboat from one of the luxury hotels, the gondola bobbed with graceful disequilibrium. The tall, thin, handsome man sitting in the gondola gripped the sides of the small wooden craft and said to his seven-year-old daughter, 'Hold on.' He thought, Gondolas are atavistic." Never mind that adjectives here are pulling more weight than they ought to bear. The real problem is the terminal apercu. Nothing that follows in this brief, intermittently charming story about...
...real Dan Quayle." Until Wednesday night, many Americans thought the real Dan Quayle was a sunny, overconfident, high- spirited young man who had spent more time on the golf links than in the library. But the Dan Quayle at the debate was a different person: a grim, wooden, frightened fellow who had stayed up late memorizing answers for the big test. So nervous were Bush's handlers that they denied Quayle any chance to be spontaneous, transforming him instead into an automaton searching for prepackaged answers that he could drone out safely...
...Sweetwater Cafe, on Boylston Place,was a little too damn cheerful. Walking in thedoor, I almost smacked into a wooden parrot.Hanging from the ceiling above was a largemenagerie of coy animals; an inflatable iguana, ashark, a toad or two. By the door was a plaquewith the Sweetwater's legend, a ribald and twistedtale that boiled down to "We made...
Farr wasn't in, and next door a man was veryinvolved with a ring and a five foot talloxyacetalyne blow torch, So I went down the hallto Taber Fowley, Wholesalers and Jobbers.Cardboard boxes were hanging haphazardly off rowsof wooden shelves; a huge iron safe, with goldgilt, was piled up with ragged-edged ledgers.Behind the counter was a tiny old man with a bluev-neck sweater and tufts of silver hair in hisears; he was looking through a pince-nez at abracelet...