Word: filches
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...dedicated to an industrialized Germany. He spent his life in a quasi-alchemistic search for "the secret of casting steel," processed more irony than iron in his foundry, the Forge of Good Hope, and died at 39 of dropsy and despair. His son Alfred was later to find and filch the sought-for secret from British forgemasters while posing as a frivolous visiting baron, Herr Schropp. After he set the Essen smokestacks belching, Alfred devoted seven years to casting a cannon in steel instead of the traditional bronze; the weapon later pulverized the French in the six-month...
...secrets, so must oilmen keep a gimlet-eyed watch on the enormously expensive geological maps they prepare to pinpoint areas where they hope to find new oil deposits. And just as the U.S. wages unceasing shadow war against spies, so are oilmen on guard against cutthroat speculators out to filch their innermost secrets. Last week in Pittsburgh, a federal grand jury let the public in on one such cloak-and-dagger game: it indicted four men for receiving Gulf Oil Co. maps stolen by an employee, and trying to peddle them for prices reportedly up to $500,000. But even...
...remembers Jim, "I had to arrange for a whole board to get elected in order to elect myself business manager of the paper." On another occasion he broke open a ballot box for two strong reasons: 1) to fix the election of a friend as prettiest girl; 2) to filch ballots proclaiming him (as he recalls) biggest liar in the class...
...hoppers, caterpillars, they work for mankind. It is their thieving relations, the so-called "social" wasps, says Crompton, that have given the family such a bad name. In a righteously separate chapter on these bad actors, he reads an indictment against the yellow jackets that terrorize the summer terrace, filch from jam jars and deliver powerful stings that hurt humans for a week. The hunting wasps, says Crompton, are not to be smeared with guilt of association; they practically never sting people, he claims-and even if they do, they do not hurt half as much as social wasps...
...walking memorials to dead Hindus, are no longer of carefully selected, high-breed (Brahman) stock as they once were, but more often cheap, scrub calfs with little breeding and less manners. Their cows are mostly skilled and shifty thieves who are set free by their owners each day to filch and pillage in other men's gardens, garbage cans and vegetable stalls before returning home at night to be milked...