Word: wretched
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...foot, is fastened by a long cord, passed round his waist, to the elephant's hind leg. The latter is urged into a rapid trot through the streets of the city, and every step gives the cord a violent jerk, which makes the body of the condemned wretch bound on the pavement . . . Then his head is placed upon a stone, and the elephant executioner crushes it beneath his enormous foot...
...good time, whether or not sex is involved. (That is a new shortened form of the get-drunk-and-get-naked party, which collegians fantasized about 20 years ago.) At Michigan State University, one who is vomiting is driving the bus, a reference to the toilet seat and the wretch's need to hang on to it. Sckacks means ugly. A two-bagger is a girl who requires exactly that to cover her ugliness. Young women, of course, retaliate. At breakfast in Bates Hall at Wellesley, they wonder, "Why bother with a guy if he doesn't make...
...this edifice, and Gene Outka, a professor of religious studies at Yale, is seriously posing conundrums, one of which concerns a military chieftain in some benighted land who has condemned ten political prisoners to death but who offers to spare nine if an American will personally shoot the remaining wretch. Outka is taking his audience carefully over difficult ground. Still, there is something off-putting about the contrast between the violence of the parable and the safety of the speaker and the cosseted elders listening to him in their sanctuary...
Falstaff is generally regarded the greatest comic figure in English literature, and more will agree with Orson Welles that it is "the best role that Shakespeare ever wrote" than will share Bernard Shaw's narrow view of the man as "a besotted and disgusting old wretch." We find in him features drawn from the miles gloriosus of ancient Roman comedy, from the stage Vice, Devil, Fool, and Lord of Misrule, from Rabelais and Heaven knows what else-all heightened through Shakespeare's astonishing inventiveness into something far greater than the sum of his parts...
...confront him with the rubber pipe he hides in the basement and doesn't tell him she knows he wants to kill himself with it. Linda chastizes ungrateful Biff when he rebels; he is trying to shake off the chains of his father's beliefs about him. "You wretch! You don't know, but I'll tell you! That man has taken not a step that wasn't to help you, Biff. He slaved for 36 years so that you could be a success. And all you see is a bumbling phony old fool who talks to himself." Sally Chamberlain...