Word: wordless
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This extremely important emotional interplay, often described as "bonding," is a combination of love and play, but it is now seen as something else, a kind of wordless dialogue. The baby not only understands what the mother is communicating, or not communicating, but it is trying to tell her things, if she will only listen. Says Dr. Bennett Leventhal of the University of Chicago's Child Psychiatry Clinic: "We now know that babies send messages very early. In their first year of life, they are good students. They are also very good teachers, but they have to have someone...
Given that Sylvester Stallone has always acted more expressively with his muscles than with his mouth, one has to admire the near wordless dispatch with which those who contrived First Blood set him to maiming and killing a multitude of people in a multitude of imaginative ways. That they manage this without causing any loss of sympathy for him shows a close analysis of the problem of selling the star when he is not defending Rocky's title as the heavyweight champion of the heartwarming clich...
...France, where he had served as an artilleryman during World War I, MacLeish spent five years among the expatriates of the Lost Generation, and from this came a number of rather conventional but polished lyrics. "A poem should be wordless/ As the flight of birds," ran the most celebrated one, "Ars Poetica." "A poem should not mean/ But be." But larger ideas were stirring. MacLeish went to Mexico to write the epic of Cortez, and Conquistador won him a Pulitzer for 1932. But by then there were other demands on his talent...
...debate about Coolidge will go on. The verbal sketches in William Allen White's 1938 biography A Puritan in Babylon still loom large in public memory: "Flinty-faced, sugar-cured and hickory-smoked, the wordless Yankee joss sitting cross-legged in the, cosmos"; the world was "running madly extravagant"; Coolidge "stood, blinking at the tidal forces he could not fathom." If Reagan's economics fail, historians may say the same about him. If supply-side succeeds in some fashion, Reagan will not only give himself a boost in history but win a few more years of White House...
...societies are held together by an immensely intricate webbing of mutual obligation (and perhaps by an equal and opposite network of betrayal). The system starts with nods and smiles and wordless understandings; it elaborates itself interminably through certain assumptions, casual promises, oral agreements, laborious plans, written contracts and formal vows, and ends finally in that thunderous atavism, the solemn oath: the promise with a jolt of the sacred in it, the upraised hand, the divinity standing by to witness...