Word: avuncular
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After Jerry Garcia, the bearded, avuncular guitarist for the Grateful Dead, died of a heart attack while in a drug-rehab facility in 1995, one of the band's two drummers, Mickey Hart, gradually withdrew from life. He stopped going out as much, and he wouldn't play Grateful Dead music at all; he couldn't even listen to it. "I didn't play it in the house for about a year and a half," Hart says, remembering. "Oh man, are you kidding? I would cry. It was just too painful. Jerry was my best friend and the heart...
...sadistically strict math teacher or when describing the ghost of the narrator's little sister. Another ghost story, related by the narrator's aunt by way of Henry James' Turn of the Screw, gains spookiness in the retelling. And the sex talk kindly given the narrator by an avuncular priest, which leads the boy to conclude that "love is in Latin, lust isn't," is uproarious...
DIED. LEO BUSCAGLIA, 74, avuncular, affectionate professor and author of numerous books on the permutations of love and self-acceptance; of a heart attack; near Lake Tahoe, Nev. Relentlessly upbeat, Buscaglia taught at U.S.C. for nearly 20 years, including a course in 1969 called Love 1A. He became known as Dr. Hug because of his habit of embracing the thousands of fans worldwide who turned out in droves to hear his encouraging aphorisms and elevated four of his books to the best-seller list at one time...
MARCH 6 The avuncular friend turns nasty to the press after a judge reportedly admonishes him for talking too much in public: "I want some goddam privacy. Get back, all of you. Get away from...
...vaguely mammalian mien--appropriate for a creature whose Japanese name, Gojira, is an amalgam of kujira (whale) and gorira (gorilla)--the fin-de-siecle Godzilla has a crocodilian brow, iguana affectations, a T. Rex crouch and a noble if dragonish chin instead of an avuncular Adam's apple. As for the radioactive breath, well, it was hard for Tatopoulos to justify, so don't expect it. No lizard does that in nature, he argues. "We were creating an animal. We weren't creating a monster...