Word: hippopotamus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...charismatic actor with a voice of bronze, Terfel, 33, also has the popular touch without which no classical singer can become a full-fledged superstar; at his 1996 Carnegie Hall recital debut, he actually led the delighted audience in a sing-along version of Flanders and Swann's Hippopotamus Song...
...children who have no insurance--that are being sold as fiscally prudent. "The new spending programs are like baby hippopotami now," Gramm explains, relishing every syllable. "They're small and they're cute. But in five years each of those baby hippopotami will be a big, ol' ugly hippopotamus...
NORFOLK, Virginia: Nyla, the Virginia Zoo's only hippopotamus, died of a bowel blockage on Sunday after she ate a racquetball tossed into her pen by a visitor. Zookeepers were mystified by Nyla's death until an autopsy of the 4,300-pound hippo showed that she had a 2-inch rubber ball blocking her intestinal passageway. Though authorities knew the hippo was suffering some kind of obstruction, they did not perform surgery, fearing she would die during the procedure. Nyla, 31, had lived at the zoo for more than 20 years after spending her youth as part...
Wallace is the novel's Hippo, so nicknamed decades before as an undergraduate (the reference is to T.S. Eliot's doggerel, "The hippopotamus' day/ Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;/ God works in a mysterious way-/ The Church can sleep and feed at once ..."). Wallace was a drama critic for one of the seedier London newspapers until he arose during an idiotic stage performance and screamed curses. At liberty, he is asked by a terminally ill goddaughter to find out whether a moody 15-year-old boy, Wallace's godson, really has a powerful healing gift...
Some idler is sure to begin a critique of Stephen Fry's funny, sharp-tongued novel The Hippopotamus (Random House; 290 pages; $21) by referring loftily to the title character as "the eponymous hippopotamus." Shun this pedant, who should consider another line of work. Read the novel, however. Its virtues are cynicism and ill will, directed energetically at all that is trendy and modern, and embodied in the blubbery, whiskified carcass of an out-of-date poet named Ted Wallace...