Word: adrift
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tugboat still bumping at her side. At a sharp bend in the channel, the Raman neatly dropped anchor in the darkness, pirouetted about the anchor chain, then hoisted anchor and headed for the open sea, 50 miles downstream. The five crewmen scrambled up from the tugboat and cut it adrift. Belching black smoke, the Raman gathered speed while her captain, Rifat Onder, turned a cold. Nelson-like eye to every signal to halt. From the docks a police message flashed to Bremerhaven at the Weser's mouth: "Stop darkened tanker heading for open...
...back in Bremen, where police took the precaution of disabling her engines. Then they threw at Owner Mardin just about every charge in the maritime code book: speeding, dangerous passing, scraping a dock, steaming without lights, failing to give signals or obey traffic regulations, cutting a tug adrift and violating Germany's customs, passport, currency and ship clearance regulations. For all that, the police inspector could not down his admiration. "I must offer my highest praise for your brilliant navigational maneuvers," said he handsomely. Replied Hasim Mardin, with a bow: "I must return the compliment. Your officials...
...hours a day, six days and six dollars a week. Eventually he was to find a life very much to his liking, but at the end of this long book he is back home in Galesburg, his hoboing and the Spanish-American War behind him, and he is still adrift...
Until World War II, says Chalmers, U.S. thinking in general was hopelessly adrift. It had degenerated into a superficial sentimentalism, dominated "by wishes which were taken for facts" and by "the widespread conviction . . . that evil does not really exist in individuals, but arises only because of bad arrangements among them." In their blind pursuit of objectivity, scholars had become as indifferent to values as scientists, and semanticists had concluded that "ideas behind words are so varying and inconstant that all we really have left at any time is names." All in all, it was the era of the abolished absolute...
...seeking to apply the broad and all-inclusive definition of 'sacrilegious' given by the New York courts, the censor is set adrift upon a boundless sea amid a myriad of conflicting currents of religious views, with no charts but those provided by the most vocal and powerful orthodoxies. New York cannot vest such unlimited restraining control over motion pictures in a censor...