Word: woodenness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...committed when he was 17 years old, is not atypical. Carter, who is black, grew up in a Houston housing project and was routinely taunted and beaten by other children because his clothes were ragged and dirty. His mother and stepfather would thrash Robert and his five siblings with wooden sticks and electric cords. At age five, he was hit in the head with a brick. At 10, one of his brothers hit him so hard on the head with a baseball bat that the bat broke. Another time, his mother smashed a dinner plate on his head. None...
Against the nurses' orders I bring her vanilla ice cream from time to time in a small cardboard cup, and I feed her with a flat wooden spoon. She takes her regular food through a tube in her stomach, so the taste of the sweet, cold substance makes her salivate and smile. She will exclaim, "This is delicious!" after every taste, with exactly the same intonation, as if she feared that if she used any other formula to express her appreciation, I would not reward her with another spoonful...
Posters for the production advertise it as "a new vision," one which will shock those familiar with the play's often lush productions. Foley's Antony and Cleopatra's is set in the Victorian Age, and Cleopatra's Egypt is a drab bedroom furnished only with a frumpy wooden four-poster bed. Instead of flowing and exotic garments, Cleopatra and her two dowdy maidservants wear corsets and stiff, dull-colored Victorian dresses with high collars...
When Gore wants to, his formality gives way to real charm, but even that is carefully calibrated. It is commonplace to say Gore wears a wooden mask in public and removes it in private to reveal a funny, knowing, ironic man of the world. But the quick wit Gore deploys in White House meetings or off-the-record encounters with reporters is just another layer of the onion, another protective device. He trusts almost no one, worries about leaks and guards himself to such an extent that some aides are not sure they have ever met the real Gore. "When...
...provide shoppers soft chairs and couches and ample space to sprawl on the carpet, bridging the gap between bookstore and living room-a fact the Coop seemingly ignored in the redesign. The new store is cool and spatially tight, and is dotted not with couches but with the stiff, wooden Harvard chairs found in some classrooms and dorm rooms, hardly inviting us to sit and stay awhile...