Word: gaff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Chief trappers are experts and bureaucrats, says Thurber, and gives some examples. Once he tried his hand at sailing and a Bermuda lady-expert promptly asked: "Do you reef in your gaff-topsails when you are close-hauled or do you let go the mizzentop-bowlines and crossjack-braces?" Author Thurber did not know, partly because he just sailed for the hell of it, partly because the lady was so nautical that what she really said was: "Do you reef in your gassles when you are cold or do you let go the mittens and crabapples...
...America into the war at one stroke dissolved three Harvard organizations: The League for A Declared War, The Student Defense League, and the Committee Against Military Intervention. Two of these were pressure groups whose work was done; the third was a pressure group which couldn't stand the gaff. But actually they were only paper organizations to whom placing verbiage in the Crimson was the end-all of existence. And they deserved to fall...
...when that war ended, Tojo the Younger was graduated from Tokyo's Imperial Military Academy. For 29 years his military career was unremarkable, but in 1934 Major General Tojo, as Chief of the Military Inquiry Department, achieved his first international press by committing a colossal gaff. He declared with strange clairvoyance: "The United States, Russia and China, knowing that Japan is likely to be confronted with various international difficulties in November, 1935, are steadily preparing for war." Apparently the Kwantung Army had cooked up an "incident" for November 1935. General Tojo was obliged to state that he had really...
...entered Edajima Naval Academy. He worked hard enough to graduate second in his class, for which the Emperor gave him a pair of binoculars. His first cruise was to the U.S. His first gaff was in the Russo-Japanese War, when he joined the cruiser Saiyen as navigating officer and a few days later navigated her, despite the Imperial spyglasses, onto a mine. She sank, and most of the officers and crew with her. Nomura says of his survival: "Ship she go down; me I come up." The Navy made Navigator Nomura a diplomat. He served in Vienna and Berlin...
...died when a roar of British throats took its place. Down the sky like an aimless maple-seed pod fluttered a crippled Fiat. Two parachutes opened and floated down. They were seen to land on the sea, but the gear dragged the pilots down before a destroyer could gaff them...