Word: freakish
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Peace. Strong on defense, Britain and France seemed weak on surprise. Neither gaunt Mr. Neville Chamberlain, taking his after-breakfast stroll as usual, nor serious M. Daladier, had the talent, training, or freakish love of shock to plan a move of the sort that Hitler had made. As profound gloom settled over the capitals of Europe-in Moscow, belatedly, as well as in Berlin-some great stroke of unprecedented originality, some inspired action unlike any that diplomatic history had known, seemed called for to answer Hitler's. But the imaginations of peace were not productive. Memories of Munich, when...
Safe as a county fair was aviation's winter meet, the All-American Air Maneuvers, at Miami last week. A half-dozen speed events went off like buggy-races. The ships that flew in them were not freakish rocket ships, but ordinary sport and businessmen's airplanes. At the finish at week's end, no open speed records had been broken, but no flier had been killed or maimed, no ship demolished. It was aviation's first big safe and sane get-together...
...content with the protection of his cryptic shorthand when he confided his amours to his diary, Pepys added further screens by making up a pidgin language of French, Spanish and Latin, with toy words and a freakish kind of lustful baby talk. "She would not suffer that je should poner my mano above ses jupes which je endeavoured," he wrote of one modest soul. But although Librarian Turner transcribed such passages, Pepys's secrets are still reasonably safe 270 years after the night Mrs. Pepys caught him with the charming Deb Willet. Talking things over with publishers and college...
...South, where freakish twisters were still coursing along the Alabama-Mississippi boundary and last week killed ten people and wrecked hundreds of houses, driving rains brought most creeks and rivers to flood stage, some beyond. Onto Whitestone Mountain in northwest Georgia descended a mighty cloudburst that sounded like Niagara, rushed down to destroy the tiny quarry town of Whitestone (pop. 200), where a family of 13 were drowned in one house...
...path but by its centrifugal force leaves a low pressure area in which air-filled buildings literally explode. Most serious that the valley has suffered in years, last week's tornadoes, according to Red Cross estimates, killed 20 people, injured 188, left 2,000 homeless, and were characteristically freakish...