Word: cracks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...some incomprehensible alchemy, the Summer School Players have been fired by this play to produce by far their best performance of either this or last summer. The Players, in fact, seem to enjoy themselves extravagently; they crack their dreary jokes with every sign of glee; manipulate a formidable number of accents and dialects with surprising confidence; and don't even slow down in the middle of the dialogue's horrible stretches of Moorish waste. They are themselves as funny as their play is tiresome...
...abandonment of the old headquarters at Sidi-bel-Abbès makes many Legionnaires feel that the days of glory are over. They cannot get the old thrill from plans to reshape the Legion into a crack, technical-minded force able to carry out all tasks, including nuclear ones. The change of headquarters from sun-scorched Sidi-bel-Abbes to the French mainland has been accompanied by a sharp decline in candidates for enlistment. An ex-Legionnaire, who was not surprised, grumbled, "Men joined the Foreign Legion for adventure, to see camels, giraffes and Tonkinese girls-not the suburbs...
...Guard oversized, undertrained and largely outmoded in the age of nuclear deterrence and guerrilla warfare. McNamara had his reasons. When two National Guard divisions were federalized during the Berlin buildup-the 49th Armored of Texas and the 32nd Infantry of Wisconsin-McNamara was shocked to find that these supposedly crack units needed nearly five months to reach combat status. He discovered that the Guard had 95 antiaircraft companies armed with old-line 90-mm. guns that were useless against supersonic jet aircraft. And he found that the Guard was loaded down with such excess baggage as laundry companies, bath units...
...committee aimed at just that. For years, Williams has tried to reform fraternities with piecemeal measures. The college cut out freshman rushing, worked to eliminate racial discrimination clauses, launched a "total opportunity" system giving every student a crack at some fraternity. But none of this, said the committee, cured the "inherent defect" of "the abdication by the College of part of its own responsibility...
...times his "Ay, no; no, ay" to perfection. This is a moving spectacle indeed. There remains only for the prop department to come up with a better hand-mirror than an allwooden imitation; the best actor in the world could not dash it to the floor with the glass "crack'd in a hundred shivers...