Slit

slit







Y

D



–verb (used with object) 

1. to cut apart or open along a line; make a long cut, fissure, or opening in.

2. to cut or rend into strips; split. 



rend 

撕碎,扯破

(因憤怒, 痛苦等而)揪扯 (衣服或頭髮等)

She was rending her [hair] out in [anger].



–noun 

3. a straight, narrow cut, opening, or aperture. (相機, 望遠鏡等的鏡頭的)孔徑





C



slit (v.)   

 

This verb has unchanging principal parts: slit is infinitive, past tense, and past participle.





 　

Animated by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane—another music video director, as well as an erstwhile member of the Marvel bullpen, working on Spider-Man no less—these sequences give Altar Boys a necessary dialectic. Francis and Tim imagine the dangerously prissy Sister Assumpta (producer Jodie Foster) as the monstrous villainess Nunzilla—as though her wooden leg, and corresponding performance, didn't already identify her as a creature out of Luis Buñuel. (This enemy of free expression spends her evenings laboriously erasing doodles from textbooks and confiscates Tim's precious copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with the flattering warning that "Blake is a very dangerous thinker.")



Less specific than Fuhrman's novel, Care's movie is set in a small Southern city in the mid '70s. The ambience is summery and unnecessarily generic. (It's a shame that the kids are not aware of Justin Green's underground comic Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, a relative bestseller of the era.) Parents are rarely evident, as are teachers. Talk about your budgetary shortfalls: Sister Assumpta's only colleague seems to be the chain-smoking, less devout Father Casey (Vincent D'Onofrio). Where the book's protagonists are mainly eighth graders, the kids here seem to be several years older. The disconnect [renders] their foolish risk-taking somewhat less credible, although it does give a more mature feel to Francis's poignantly tormented romance with his shy classmate Margie (Jena Malone), a lip-biting loner whom Francis courts with a poem Tim adapts from Blake ("Margie, Margie, Burning bright..."). 



Margie professes, not without reason, to believe in ghosts, and she has her own spooky glamour for having once slit her [wrists]. (The thin, wistful Malone plays almost the same role in Donnie Darko—although Altar Boys, which was delayed for a year by its elaborate animation, was evidently shot first.) In the cartoon adventures that Francis imagines, Margie appears as the bewitchingly endangered Sorcerella; more disturbingly, she also provides The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys with its Southern Gothic element. Placing her character [under] a convincing spell is a difficult bit of acting that Malone [executes] with impressive diffidence. 



erstwhile

【古】從前,往昔

confiscate

沒收,將... 充公,徵收

wistful

She had a last wistful [look] at the house.

The boy looked with wistful [eyes] at the toys on display.





abyss

fall into the [abyss], [abyss] of shame

abysm (figurative)

abysmal

[abysmal] ignorance, her concentration was [abysmal] 

abysmal[ly] gloomy

the [abyssal] zone (oceanography)

orifice 

crevice 

tiny crevices between our [teeth]

crevasses 

yawning crevasses in our knowledge of the [universe]

fissure

The roots of the tree loosened their holds in the fissures of the [rock].

rictus

the gape of the mouth of a bird

his face frozen into a [rictus] of unease and dislike, his eyes turned away, as the classmate [rattles] on and on.

Vicinity