2023年6月26日星期一

cavort, prelate, by the skin of your teeth, -in-waiting, goon, bellicose

Joy is not a given in the natural world. The baby rabbit I watched cavorting in the pollinator garden was almost certainly born in the nest next to our backyard brush pile. I have seen no other survivor from that litter, and their mother is still the lone adult rabbit in the yard. By now she has surely hidden another litter somewhere nearby, though I haven’t stumbled upon it. I may never see those kits at all, just as I may never see any baby Carolina wrens. Most of the young in this yard do not live to see adulthood, for this yard, like the great world, is full of predators and other dangers.

One of Italy's best-known church-watchers has asserted that Pope Francis was trapped, in effect, by the gay lobby into naming a prelate with a very murky personal life to a job that would supposedly involve cleaning up the troubled Vatican bank. Pressed about this matter, the pontiff said he hadn't come across any specifically "gay lobby" although there were plenty of other lobbies of "greedy people" in sight. A "quick investigation" had found the allegations about the newly appointed cleric to be unfounded, he insisted.

The reliably bellicose Global Times, a Communist Party paper, dutifully recalled that Taiwan is in China’s eyes a province-in-waiting, deserving of its protection.

....the fragility of civilisation (Kenneth Clark): "No one realised better than Delacrox that we had got through by the skin of our theeth

Orthodox Christianity: Brothers in Christ
Prelates of the Christian East manage to avoid a rupture

The Father Cutie Scandal: Sex and the Single Priest

By Tim Padgett / Miami

The Archdiocese of Miami punishes an ultra-popular prelate after a tabloid publishes pictures of him cavorting with a woman

On the Cover of Sunday's Book Review

'Under the Dome'

By STEPHEN KING
Reviewed by JAMES PARKER

When an enormous transparent dome settles over a small town in Maine in Stephen King's new novel, it's just fine with Big Jim, the local tyrant-in-waiting, and his pet goon squad.

in waiting
In attendance, especially on a royal personage. For example, The prelates who were in waiting asked him to take the last rites. This usage has become less common with the diminution of royalty and royal courts but still survives. [Late 1600s]

Brothers in Christ

Jul 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

This 1961 report on the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex, England, presents a rather dramatic contrast to the modern-day parks concert concept. Instead of loud cellphone talkers and cavorting children, women arrived in evening gowns and pearls and men wore tuxedos as they ate country picnics (with champagne) and played croquet.

Video: This Is How They Did Summer Parks Concerts in 1961

The New York Philharmonic parks concerts recently brought free...

WQXR.ORG

By the skin of their teeth, prelates of the Christian East avoid a rupture

WHENEVER two or more Orthodox Christian clerics join in celebrating the Eucharist—consecrating bread and wine in a manner that is far more elaborate, solemn and formal than is usual in today’s Christian West—it creates a special bond between them. And if one Orthodox cleric refuses to “concelebrate” with another, that is a sign of a deep, painful rift.
That helps to explain why Orthodox Christians all over the world (who may number more than 200m, if one makes generous assumptions about the religiosity of ordinary Russians and Ukrainians) looked on with fascination as two important gentlemen, one from Moscow and the other from Istanbul, came together in Kiev on July 27th to conduct their church’s most important rite. This was a powerful, if provisional, moment of reconciliation between the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Moscow, whose relations have been scratchy for most of the past decade.

by the skin of your teeth
If you do something by the skin of your teeth, you only just succeed in doing it:
He escaped from the secret police by the skin of his teeth.

Just barely, very narrowly, as in Doug passed the exam by the skin of his teeth. A related term appears in the Bible (Job 19:20), where Job says, "I am escaped with the skin of my teeth," presumably meaning he got away with nothing at all. Today the phrase using by is used most often to describe a narrow escape. [c. 1600] Also see squeak through.

goon
n. Slang