Word: dumbness
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...born on the feast day of Saint Igor (June 18), at Oranienbaum, on the Gulf of Finland, where his family frequently spent their summers. In his autobiography, he recalls the "sharp resinous tang of fresh cut wood" and an enormous dumb peasant, feared by all the other kids, who sang a song "composed of two syllables, the only ones he could pronounce . . . From beneath [his] red shirt he extracted a succession of sounds [by putting his right hand under his left armpit, then pumping his left arm against it] which were somewhat dubious but very rhythmic ... At home...
...shriveled, sightless old man, ready for death to snatch him (see cut). In a corner of the canvas, like a bit of an old snapshot, is a tiny picture of Poleo as he really looks. Beneath that hangs one sick eye, freshly torn from its socket, staring, in dumb fascination, from a ruined wall...
Healing Touch. Dr. Fernald uses every standard psychological trick in the book to gain the confidence of her "patients." But more important, she really likes children. Young students, warped by years of being called "dumb," are greeted by a warm and sympathetic smile, a gentle, unhurried approach and the flattery of being talked to as equals. She has the same easy way with animals. There is always at least one dog and one cat in her Beverly Hills home, and she frequently tries to persuade students in her undergraduate psychology classes to find homes for the strays she picks...
Elegance of Line. The play-within-a-play is handled with high elegance and tension, in sinister dumb show, accompanied by the snarling archaic charm of the music William Walton composed for the occasion. The camera, always holding the mimes at distant center, steals in a lordly semicircle past the enormous heads of the guilty, the guileless, and the pitilessly watchful; and rising whispers, like leaves in a storm-foreboding wind, underline the shock and horror of this deadly piece of court satire. From there on, the film arches in unbroken grandeur and intensity...
...business, looked out for Number One, and found it surprisingly profitable. It was, by & large, a time of easy earning and free spending. We did not know then, as we do now, that in a time of rising prices, of inflating values, you really have to be very dumb indeed to fail to make money . . . Each man took care of himself, but the sum total of all this self-reliance was that the devil not only took the hindmost but the foremost and those in between...