Word: penniless
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...years he has been a painter, and for all but the past five of them. Bram van Velde has been penniless and unknown, a man so much alone that he has almost lost the gift of speech. Seemingly too late to give him any satisfaction, he is now becoming famous and solvent. He has had enormously successful shows in Swiss and Dutch museums. At his big retrospective at the influential Galerie Knoedler in Paris last fall, some of his paintings fetched prices up to $18,000. This week a similar show opens at Knoedler's in Manhattan...
...Viennese authorities by boasting that he had discovered a way of lithographing bank notes. He went home to Munich only to find that his brothers, to whom he had entrusted his business, had no intention of giving it back. He died at the age of 63, practically penniless...
...Macmillan; $16). The fifth edition of this highly regarded work is considerably enlarged, and an even greater delight to logomaniacs than the first four. Lexicographer Partridge pads resolutely after creeping neologism, and one finds that since 1920 "without a mintie" has been Australian sporting slang for penniless, and that "boat race" is current Cockney rhyming slang for face. There is no end to this; it is ceaselessly fascinating to learn that between 1780 and 1830, "to dance the Paddington frisk" meant to be hanged, that "painted mischief" is an obsolete term for playing cards, and that "paff!" is a contemptuous...
...practicality of proposed government plans to move whole sierra villages into the vast, unsettled selva is extremely dubious to anyone who has felt the oppressive, steaming air of the Amazon basin. Until some solution is found, penniless sierra Indians and mestizos will continue to pour into the rapidly growing slums which ring Peru's modern coastal cities...
...novel gets much of its quality from the convoluted Jamesian style, which is hardly suited to song. Still, Composer Moore ( The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Ballad of Baby Doe) was fascinated by the story of a young Englishwoman who urges her penniless lover to start a flirtation with an ailing American heiress, hoping that the heiress, who is compared in the story to a dove, will soon die and leave him rich and free. In stripping the story to the operatic bone, Moore and Librettist Ethan Aver changed the name of the scheming suitor from Merton Densher to Miles...