Word: preciously
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These three types of Singer stories share a sharp urgency, a sense that time is too precious to waste on flowery descriptions or circumlocutions. One character commands another, "Speak simple Yiddish," the language in which all these tales were originally written, and the English translations by the author and others do their best to obey the spirit of this injunction. Storytellers appear suddenly, with scant preamble, and seem eager to get off the page as soon as possible. They punctuate their narratives with such remarks as "To make it short . . ." and "Why drag it out?" The Trap involves yet another...
...generations of Russians, books have been surrounded by exaltation and tragedy. In a prison camp in the Gulag during the 1960s, the poet and essayist Andrei Sinyavsky hid hand-copied pages of the Book of Revelations in the calf of his boot. He wrote, "What is the most precious, the most exciting smell waiting for you in the house when you return to it after half a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books...
Early in the novel, he visits Arthur, who is house-sitting for the Bell-weathers, a snobbish couple. Cleveland arrives and discovers that the family's precious pooch is in heat. Cleveland invites a neighbor's three dogs over for an orgy...
...country's power system," he explains. "I have told the Egyptian people clearly -- we do not have enough." At the Aswan High Dam, Supervisor Hamdi el Shaffei observes, "Water is our fuel. Not a drop is wasted." Under his feet, huge turbines hum as thousands of gallons of precious Nile River water gush past each second, heading north on the last leg of a 4,150-mile journey through Africa...
...began badly for the team of American biblical scholars who had been granted a rare opportunity to examine and photograph a precious manuscript in Jerusalem's Shrine of the Book. Hunched over a swath of darkened and decomposing parchment with a powerful magnifying glass, they were barely able to discern a single letter. But that night, as they reviewed photo negatives still wet from the developing tank, their luck changed dramatically. Passages that had been invisible to the naked eye jumped out at them from the film. "It was a moment of exploding consciousness," recalls James Charlesworth, professor...