Word: birching
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...from Lansing, Mich.: "When you step on the island, it's like stepping back 200 years." Flora and fauna spotters can look for 101 varieties of wildflowers, 40 varieties of birds and five kinds of fish that are unique to the island; moose can be seen swimming in birch-fringed coves. For those who like to commune with room service as well as nature, the island has a modern hotel at each...
...headstones have a variety of uses. Literary Anecdotes forms a handy vade mecum of great and terrible superlatives. What, for instance, is the best way to die? Surely it must be singing lustily, as did William Blake. Who invented the most uncomfortable method of fishing? The appropriately named Thomas Birch, who tried to make himself inconspicuous to the fish by dressing up as a tree. What is the most gallant method of repulsing a bore at a party? Undoubtedly, Robert Browning's: "But, my dear fellow, this is too bad. I am monopolizing...
...raised in the forbidding London home of a pious uncle. When she is so light-minded as to laugh aloud at the antics of a bird in the garden, he whips her neck with a watch chain. The child accurately notes that it was indeed the custom to birch girls on the bared portions of their anatomies, but adds that nevertheless it was "inexpressibly painful...
...Soviet elite is enjoying the biggest slice of the steady growth in national wealth. "There's more pie and more fat flies to share it," notes a Leningrad sociologist. On the woody outskirts of Moscow, the birch-shaded grounds of Khrushchev's old dacha at Petrovo-Dalneye are being torn up to make room for rows of mini-dachas, which look like motel cabins, for middle-rung apparatchiks. The system of special stores for top people, stocked with Western goods and local caviar, is expanding...
Turk is an enthusiastic guide who leavens his tours with puns and one-liners. Sample: "Have you heard about the tree that didn't know whether it was a son of a birch or a son of a beech?" But he is serious about spreading the word that trees can repair the land, and has even written and published a book, The New Forest, describing his experiences. The book is dedicated to the spirit of Johnny Appleseed, who "planted while others palavered." Those words could just as easily describe Turk Jones...