Word: circular
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
VIRTUALLY every man has experienced pain and therefore knows just how it feels. But he cannot tell anybody else what it is really like. Pain cannot even be precisely defined. Lay and medical dictionaries alike offer essentially circular definitions of it as hurt, distress or suffering-pain is pain. Half the medical textbooks say little about it, except for extreme and uncommon forms, and doctors learn correspondingly little about it in medical school. The great British physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington described pain as "the psychical adjunct of an imperative protective reflex." More simply, pain is what the victim perceives...
...different things: "1) A personal, private sensation of hurt; 2) a harmful stimulus, which signals current or impending tissue damage; and 3) a pattern of responses, which operates to protect the organism from harm." Sternbach concedes that his use of "hurt" in the first part of his redefinition is circular, but insists that the important consideration is the total...
...appearance, Sharif is astonishingly similar to Che, and Palance's broken-nosed, cigar-chomping cobra is as close to Castro as any American is likely to get. It is a pity that the actors could not grow insight or force along with their beards. Palance's circular hand motions and staccato vocalizing recall Cagney rather than Castro. Sharif's acting is not lively enough to be considered passive; his revolutionary ardor is expressed by a narrowing or widening of his large, liquid eyes...
...first hint of more serious trouble occurred after Apollo 10 had slipped into its nearly circular 69-mile orbit around the moon. Crawling through the tunnel connecting Charlie Brown to Snoopy, Stafford discovered that the padding on Charlie Brown's hatch had been ripped during the pressurization of the lunar module early in the flight, allowing snowlike fiber-glass insulation to escape and drift around the tunnel interior. During Apollo's eleventh revolution, as Stafford and Cernan prepared to undock Snoopy for its descent toward the moon, the astronauts found that they could not depressurize the connecting tunnel...
This massive family chronicle begins impressively and then dissipates itself in authorish rhetoric and an obsessively circular kind of storytelling. In the end, the balance left to praise is slighter by the measure of Novelist Calisher's fondness for the supersubtle...