Word: rattletrap
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...metaphor applied. The ancient island democracy was a place where "Ravens from their walls of shale/Cruise around the rotting whale." Europe was the beached behemoth and the ravens, the Blackshirts and the SS. Out of their few weeks spent getting saddle sores on bad-tempered Icelandic ponies or in rattletrap buses on boulder-paved roads, eating terrible meals of smoked mutton in smokier hovels, Auden and MacNeice re-created an odd and magical journey compounded of poems (satirical, epistolatory and familiar), letters, guidebook information, parodies, private jokes and public protest...
...sometimes holes up to sleep. The TV sits humming dumbly through a test pattern that testifies to a restless night. From a wastebasket Harper retrieves some sodden coffee grounds in a filter, brews and glumly drinks a stale, disgusting cupful. Moments later, he roars along the freeway in a rattletrap sports car that has one door and fender bumped out and prime-coated-this man has been in a few scrapes before...
...Lyndon disappointed his parents by not turning immediately to college. Instead, as he told a recent graduating class at Johnson City High, he "headed West to seek the fame and fortune that I knew America offered." Less grandly, that meant that he and a few buddies piled into a rattletrap car early one morning and stole away to California. Twenty months later, totally broke, he hitchhiked home, worked on a road gang under a searing sun for a dollar a day. His mother kept drumming college into his head, and Lyndon finally conceded that "I'd rather...
...they consume is hardly sufficient solace for a life that is endlessly drab. Industrial production is up, and food supplies are adequate, but Warsaw, like most Polish cities, is bleak and shabby; at night the ill-lit streets are empty but for a scattering of street cleaners, drunks and rattletrap taxis...
...muleback across dusty roads, on rattletrap chartered buses, walking down steep mountain paths, the Greeks of Cyprus this week practiced what their forebears invented 2,500 years ago. In the first popular elections since 1931, Cyprus got ready to become a self-governing republic in February. Under the Anglo-Greek-Turkish truce to end the island's four-year civil war, the new republic of Cyprus is to have a President elected by the island's Greek community, a Vice President chosen by its smaller Turkish community. The Turkish Cypriots, by acclamation, had already chosen that Vice President...