Word: compassable
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...broken camps or other varieties of "terr spoor," army slang for terrorist tracks. Says Major James Cromar, 43, a reserve commander stationed near the Mozambique border: "We have created a top-rate bush fighter. You can drop an average reserve troopie anywhere in the country at night with a compass, and he can give you a six-figure grid reading which can put you within 100 yards of his position...
...wooden propeller threw its sheet-metal tipping on a southbound mail flight from Chicago." Again, "my DH throttle mechanism broke and closed a hundred feet above ground over Illinois." The only lighting equipment his planes had in those days consisted of "a pocket flashlight (pilot furnished) and a compass light attached to a button on the end of the stick...
Even that ambitious passage from his 1947 essay A New Refutation of Time contains a self-effacing shuffle. Borges disarms that ancient foe, ineffability, by questioning his own existence. He has done so in dozens of fanciful tales bearing such tantalizing labels as Death and the Compass, Funes, the Memorious and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. Despite his arcane references, the aging (78), blind, Argentine author has gained a worldwide readership. His ficciones have also attracted numerous imitators - none of whom have the old man's grace, wit and almost magical skills of compression. A Borges story...
...Stone. Grabbing his first reporting job at age 14, Stone devoted a lifetime to the profession, working at one time or another for The New York Post, the New York Star, the New York Daily Compass, the Philadelphia Record and the Philadelphia Inquirer. But Stone's crowning glory came with his publication of the I. F. Stone Weekly, a Washington newsletter accenting political topics...
...father, a veteran artilleryman who has used the military to escape from the coal mines of his youth. Equating discipline with love, the father trains his young son to become an artillery gunner; when he takes William to visit his mother's grave, he carts along a compass so that they can make a field map of the cemetery. This utilitarian education takes: William wins a scholarship to the Military College of Science, receives a wartime-accelerated commission in the artillery, and behaves with bravery before and during the British retreat to Dunkirk...