WordWealth: incinerate

in·cin·er·ate , v.t., -at·ed, -at·ing.

When Christiane Amanpour asked President Jacques Chirac about it on CBS's "60 Minutes," he replied: "Because The New York Times is a serious newspaper, as soon as I read this I ordered an inquiry. I can now confirm officially, after an inquiry by the French foreign ministry, France and French companies have never endorsed or even provided such material to Iraq. So I am clearly denying this allegation."--Mr. Chirac knows more than I do about trade with Iraq: in the late 1970's, he facilitated France's multibillion-dollar sale of the Osirak nuclear reactor to the rising Saddam. (After Iraq officially stated that the reactor's purpose was not to incinerate Tehran but "to eliminate Zionism," Israel destroyed it.) —— William Safire; French Connection II; The New York Times; March 20, 2003

It is incongruous that the article should be talking about metal in mass incineration. The principal reason why metal should not be in question is that mass-incinerators are not technically capable of handling it. Scrap metal as well as bulky appliances and automobiles are specifically prohibited from the 1,800-degree mass-incineration furnaces. —— No Safe Limit For Radiation Exposure; The New York Times; Jan 26, 2002

We will not declare war. We might bomb the hell out of Baghdad and whup the Iraqi Republican Guard with tens of thousands of ground troops and incinerate in the process - unfortunately, of course - a whole bunch of Iraqi civilians. And we might depose the government by force and take over the country. But our politicians will not, at any point, admit that we are at war. It will be, instead, a crisis resolved by military action, or some other weasel phrase. —— Rod Liddle; We'll Call It Anything but War; Guardian; Feb 26 2003

Some of the stories in ''Things You Should Know'' -- an archly didactic title considering the things in it that you've no real need to know -- display the grotesque very much for its own sake. The extremity is disproportionate to any human message; the transgressiveness a sort of artistic complacency. ''Rockets Round the Moon'' is an example. Here, as in some of her other fiction, Homes writes not only of the sterility but of the dark nightmare corners of suburban life. The narrator, a boy whose divorced parents are chilly and dietarily correct (large salad meals), spends his time in a neighboring household, marked by warmth, noise and baloney sandwiches. It is a refuge until the father, speeding, runs over a child. That life offers no safety, even, or especially, in the suburbs, would be a reasonable point. Homes gothicizes it by having the repentant father try to incinerate himself in his barbecue pit; and his son, the narrator's pal, attempts an equivalent suicide by standing up suddenly during an amusement park ride. He manages only to throw up, befouling the narrator, while the author as arbitrary deity seems, as it were, to hold herself coolly apart. —— Richard Eder; Oddness of the Heart; The New York Times; Sept, 29, 2002

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