Word: lilliputian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...These "Lilliputian stars" do not glow like regular stars; the pressure and temperature inside them are not high enough to support the thermonuclear reactions that keep stars hot. But they need not be cold. "The heat to support life," said Shapley, "would come from their interiors, and they would not be dependent on a sun as we are. In such bodies, radioactive thorium or potassium might provide a source of energy...
What led poor Ed to his bed of pain? The story begins back in his turn-of-the-century childhood, when he is a dutiful teen-ager slaving away in his German-American father's "Lilliputian delicatessen." Father and mother have taught him that his three brothers and a sister are geniuses, but that he is a dolt. He takes it in good grace: "I sure wish I was an artist, a genius, thought Edward, instead of being dumb like I am." Dumb Ed has a dumb friend, a little pet hen that pecks "feverishly at his lips...
Equipped only with small arms-and moral authority-U.N. Secretary-General Hammarskjold and his flea-sized army appeared Lilliputian figures alongside the forces they were to keep apart (the Anglo-French invasion force alone was 50,000 strong). In Egypt the puny army must somehow ensure that two of the greatest nations in Europe abandon with grievous loss of face a last-ditch attempt to dominate a region of the world vital to their survival as major powers...
...Robert Cummings, a polysyllabic confidence man who comes from the North to swindle the Floridians, and stays on to save them. Whenever Cummings is in a tight spot, he reaches to his watch chain for a pistol the size of a tie-clip and plugs his assailant with a Lilliputian slug...
...nation lies defenseless, a Gulliver in Lilliput with Harry Truman as the second most Lilliputian of them all and Johnson a midget among them. We have only four combat airplanes, two tanks (one being Johnson himself), five six-star generals and a converted armored yawl, once the property of Josephus Daniels...