WordWealth: woe

woe (wō), n

At Central Park the promenade portion of the Paseo -- essentially a tree-lined pedestrian mall -- becomes a broad street that leads to hotels, the Capitol and the park itself. Inside the park is the famous ''Hot Corner,'' filled with men gesticulating wildly while they debate baseball. As you walk by, young men sidle up to you with their incessant offers of cigars and rum, or tales of family woe, sometimes tailing you as you climb up the long steps of the Capitol building, similar to the United States Capitol in Washington. —— David Gonzalez; One Street at a Time; Paseo Del Prado, Havana; The New York Times; March 2, 2003

I often go to places where exiles gather. While politicians and tabloids carry on hysterically demonising asylum seekers, across our cities in sad cafes they sit and wait. They smoke, sip coffee, eat old-home food, talk in repetitive loops, complaining about disobedient children who have become too English and plot wild plots before wearily heading back to bed after another night when it didn't happen. In my early years here, a Scottish friend sent me a consoling ballad that described "the deep unutterable woe, which none save exiles feel". —— Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; The Life of an Exile Can Never be Made Whole; Independent, March 10, 2003

On opening night a few of Ms. Belilove's early sequences appeared tentative. But as the evening progressed, her passion increased. Her surges of movement in the ''Blue Danube'' waltz were irresistibly joyous. Her ''Dance of the Furies'' grew ever wilder. In ''Les Funerailles,'' she turned wide stretches of her arms into gestural equivalents of tragic cries of woe. And in ''Revolutionary'' her struggles to stand symbolized attempts to cast off shackles. —— Jack Anderson; The Life and Art of the Woman Who Put the Modern in Modern Dance; The New York Times; Jan 27, 2003

Look at Thesaurus in depth

Back index, 'W'

Back index, 'V' | Next index, 'X'

> WordWealth, HOME