scion Herb Stempel (born December 19, 1926) is an American teacher who was famous for his celebrity as a television game show contestant — and for helping to...
strong-armed Stempel told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight what he told Stone. Particularly jarring was Stempel's revelation that, on the...
poontang “But you know, when he's got a bunch of half-naked poontang walking the floor of his lake house, he just likes to pay us a visit and make sure we...
What is true of Christianity is equally true of Buddhism. The Buddha was amiable and enlightened; on his deathbed he laughed at his disciples for supposing...
usurious I began selling things for friends, taking a nearly usurious 60 percent cut of the action for auctioning off their old stereo equipment, beaded...
croon Glenn Gould usually hummed while he played, and his recording engineers varied in how successfully they were able to exclude his voice from recordings......
moll She was Carlotta Monti in the biopic W.C. Fields and Me (1976) and one of her most famous movie roles came as Miss Eve Teschmacher, moll of criminal...
corral Are you into metaphysics? Do you believe in astrology? Astral projection? ESP? Tarot cards? What's that you say? You think it's all a bunch of crap?...
progeny Certain properties in popular culture fasten their fangs on our pants leg and never let go, no matter how we kick and yell. The story of Anna...
dialectical As the Decade of the Penis finishes up, one is left wondering only what might come next. As the literary critic and prominent Kinsey Report↗...
droll I couldn't begin to imagine how the arid world of over-lit computer labs and humming server rooms could have produced someone so much droller and more...
apprise Yet when apprised of Whitestone's remark about ASL↗ being limiting, Doshi says (via computer E-mail), “I truly disagree with that.” MJ Bienvenu,...
wallop The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. This collection of short stories about damaged men poses important questions: Is courage a virtue, or is it simply...
ponderous Having thus, in obedience to your majesty's commands, diligently searched all his pockets, we observed a girdle about his waist made of the hide of...
promulgate Pinyin↗ was Promulgated in 1958 by People's Republic of China. (Pinyin is a Chinese romanization system. To romanizatize a language means to make...
astringent Turn now to Frances Kiernan's Mary McCarthy↗ biography, called “Seeing Mary Plain” (Norton, $35, 939 pages), an overlong but riveting portrait...
obstreperous As a practical matter, it occurs to me that Ms. Lopez's strategy in wearing such a costume, exposing almost her entire front, was to redirect...
svelte Beattie at 22, svelte and winsome. description of a photo of a girl svelte = gracefully slender; moving and bending with ease [syn: lissome, lissom,...
presage If any feminist cultural critics want to wring their hands over Oxygen's media offerings, they should be doing so not because it's so banal, but...
fume it is apparent that you not only have a poor diction, but also wanting of erudition. The sea of your will and ignorance, seethes and fumes like a boiling...
travesty dada n. 1. A European artistic and literary movement (1916-1923) that flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by...
libertine From Mozart's Don Giovanni to Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the figure of the libertine, that politically incorrect swine, has swaggered...
Several annotated classic literature now available for download: The Arabian Nights http://xahlee.org/p/arabian_nights/index.html 西游记 (Journey To The...
addle A distressing number of my readers, however, evidently addled by the siren song of “the third word,” were unable to read my plea for surcease, and so...
chanteuse the slimy Dorian Tyrel (Peter Greene), who runs the Coco Bongo Club, where of course Tina is the slinky chanteuse. “The Mask” (1994-07-29) By...
dossier ...scientists who seek some sign of it must search the dossier of human activity for conduct that cycles with the seasons and might be linked with...
hobnob Near the end of that movie classic “The Wizard of Oz”, the wizard stands in the gondola of a hot-air balloon and bids farewell to the people of the...
