Word: tarantulas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tahiti. When his wife committed suicide, Adams gave up the life in Washington where he and Marian had played host to a brilliant circle of politicians and scholars, reflecting that he had become "a sort of ugly, bloated, purplish-blue and highly venomous hairy tarantula which catches and devours Presidents, senators, diplomats, congressmen and cabinet officers." After commissioning Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to build a memorial to Marian in Washington's Rock Creek Park, he took off on a slow boat to the South Seas. Like any tourist, he drank in the "purple mist and souffle" scenery, ogled...
WHEN people meet me they are always surprised," TIME'S Cinema reviewer once complained. "They expect me to be a nasty, screwed-up Scrooge-a mean, embittered person who bites children." Some Hollywood characters think he has the taste of a tarantula. But Associate Editor Henry Bradford Darrach Jr. is a meditative man of ideas who looks younger than his 42 years and feels that one of his faults as a reviewer is that "I try to find meaning behind appearance, which means that I sometimes do an injustice to a film." While he may at times seem...
...tortures and executions-and was himself tossed into jail for 18 months when he seemed to be getting too ambitious. After his release last year, Barbot launched a campaign of terror against his old mentor. To Haitians, it was like a choice between a scorpion and a tarantula: "What would you do with a killer who delivered the country of a homicidal maniac...
Sent to Jamaica to investigate the disappearance of a British agent there, 007 in less than 24 hours finds himself 1) abducted by a Chigro (Chinese Negro) chauffeur, 2) attacked by a furry Caribbean tarantula, 3) rammed by a hit-and-run Cadillac hearse, 4) waylaid by a sinister Chinese cutie, 5) smershed by the six-gun of a sneaky geologist. 007 senses that somebody is out to get him. Could it be the mysterious Doctor No, the mad scientist who lives in a mountain of bird droppings on Crab Key? 007 paddles over to have a look around...
There were a lot of things Johnson did not know. A tarantula is not "an insect whose bite is only cured by musick"; a cassowary is not a bird of prey; and only a jack pudding or zany would believe that pygmies are devoured by cranes. Whether today's lexicographers are wiser is another matter. Johnson may not have known what a masochist was (the eponymous Herr von Masoch had not yet been born to give his name to those who find pleasure in their own pain), but Lexicographer Johnson had a word for the type...