Word: awkward
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Constitution, American Export Lines' gem of the ocean, made it the awkward way. On the big liner's first attempt, the tide was wrong, and the Constitution drifted within a hand's breadth of smashing into its pier. Dangling anchors dropped with a screech, and with engines in full astern the big ship backed off. On the second try, after a tense hour and 15 minutes, Captain Bernt Jacobsen finally inched the Connie into its slip...
Those simple possessions were the outward badge of failure. His schooling had ended in the eighth grade, and a long succession of boring jobs without a future had made him uneasy. Awkward and bashful, he didn't even have a steady girl to cheer him. He loved his Swedish-immigrant parents, but he wanted something more exciting than his father's life as a railroad laborer, ten 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...
...through squads and platoons alongside continental Americans, rather than placed in separate units. The results in enforced understanding and companionship are often good and warming. But the language difficulty is serious. The result at the front is that squad and platoon leaders must communicate with their men in an awkward mishmash of straight American, pidgin talk and sign language, with occasional help from the few interpreters at hand. All this forwards the brotherhood of man. But it can be tough on night patrol in the cold wastelands between the lines, where each man's life may depend on perfect...
SOUTH AFRICA New Recruit A curly-haired British South African, awkward on his crutches after an automobile accident that shattered his right leg, hopped out of a green car one day last week at the entrance to Germiston Negro location, a sprawl of tin huts 15 miles east of Johannesburg. He was the first white recruit-and quite a catch-for the Passive Resistance campaign, organized by blacks, half-whites and browns against Prime Minister Daniel Malan's racial segregation laws...
...writing, the pupils are also lagging: out of 800 compositions that the committee looked over, about one in five had five or more spelling mistakes. There were also 225 errors in tense, 103 "misplaced modifiers," 309 cases of awkward structure, 729 errors involving personal pronouns, and 1,000 mistakes in "word usage and idiom...