 | Your current subscription status is: MyWordaDay Only.
> Did you know Vocab Vitamins Complete is just $16.50/year?
> Subscribe
> Account Settings
To UNSUBSCRIBE, click here and follow the instructions on our simple form.
Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (adjective)
[SOM-nah-lahnt] 
1. feeling sleepy or drowsy: "The sun came pouring through the windows, filtered gently through the greenery of surrounding trees, warming my skin and leaving me somnolent and content on the couch."
2. inducing sleep, or apt to induce sleep
adverb form: somnolently
Origin:
Approximately 1460; from Middle English, 'somnolent,' 'sompnolente,' probably formed from English noun, 'somnolence,' after the model of Middle French, 'sompnolent,' 'somnolent'; from Latin, 'somnolentus' (from 'somnus': sleep, which is related to the root 'swep-': to sleep + '-olentus': abounding in). In action:
"'He showed great confidence in the idea that reading books could give a better life to you and the people around you,' Edmundson recalls. 'We had never met someone who was so open-minded and tolerant and thoughtful and responsive and such a good listener, and it was obvious that this had something to do with the books he had read.'
What Edmundson ultimately came to admire most about his teacher was that rather than preaching to the class or nagging his students to read, he simply lived his own example. He demonstrated that books had brought him an unusual measure of freedom and dominion, despite his unimpressive physical appearance.
'It wasn't that books would help you earn money or make you smarter or give you social cachet,' Edmundson says, trying to recap the lessons that hit him so hard as a teenager. 'It was that you would feel the difference in productivity and energy and humor.'
These were not ideas that had ever reached Edmundson as he was growing up in Medford, Mass., a working-class suburb of Boston that he describes as 'sad, somnolent.' His high school, he felt, valued repetition and form over any actual notion of learning."
Marjorie Coeyman. "A tribute from a high school 'thug'," [Review of 'Teacher' by Mark Edmundson] The Christian Science Monitor (October 01, 2002).
"Although its tone is more dreamy than steamy, Tian Zhuangzhuang's film 'Springtime in a Small Town' seems to have oddly sprung from the same heated template that produced the early 50's dramas of William Inge and Tennessee Williams in which a strutting sexual superman barges into a neurasthenic environment and wreaks chaos.
Its story of a handsome cosmopolitan doctor who revitalizes a provincial household with his charismatic vitality is especially close to Inge's 'Picnic,' in which a magnetic hairy-chested stranger jolts a sleepy Kansas town out of its repressed post-war somnolence. 'Springtime in a Small Town,' like 'Picnic,' reaches its dramatic climax during a celebration in which inhibitions are lowered. Here, it is a girl's 16th-birthday party at which the guests' drinking games spin them emotionally out of control."
Stephen Holden. "A 'Picnic'-Style Hero Without the Torn T-Shirt," The New York Times (October 5, 2002).
"Gringoire, stunned by his fall, lay prone upon the pavement in front of the image of Our Lady at the corner of the street. By slow degrees his senses returned, but for some moments he lay in a kind of half-somnolent state--not without its charms--in which the airy figures of the gipsy and her goat mingled strangely with the weight of Quasimodo�s fist. This condition, however, was of short duration. A very lively sense of cold in that portion of his frame which was in contact with the ground woke him rudely from his dreams, and brought his mind back to the realities.
'Whence comes this coolness?' he hastily said to himself, and then he discovered that he was lying in the middle of the gutter.
'Devil take that hunchback Cyclops!' he growled as he attempted to rise. But he was still too giddy and too bruised from his fall. There was nothing for it but to lie where he was. He still had the free use of his hands, however, so he held his nose and resigned himself to his fate."
Victor Marie Hugo�(1802�1885). French poet, dramatist, and novelist.�"Book II: V. Sequel of the Mishap,"�Notre Dame de Paris (1831).
| |
No comments:
Post a Comment