Word: gnaw
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...through an elaborate system of probation, starting as pilgrims and gradually working up to burgher, squire and knight. They bear special names: e.g., a Hollywood physician is known as Knight Hypocrates or the Pill Peddler. Members carry swords and wear helmets, use what they consider to be antique language ("gnaw" for eat, "torch" for cigar), and engage in musical and beer-drinking contests. In the works: a club house with moat and drawbridge...
...fierce, unending war against the insects, man is getting exactly nowhere. There may be as many as 2,500,000 species of insects infesting the world, and in the U.S. alone about 10,000 of them are public enemies. Night & day they gnaw at crops, bore into homes and warehouses, attack men and animals...
Inside the perimeter is vast, antlike turmoil. Old roads are swallowed up overnight; new roads are unrolled. Gigantic machines gnaw through the hills, leaving wounds of bright red earth. Brooks flow no more; they disappear into pipes. "Here's how they build a road in there," said a numbed South Carolinian. "First come bulldozers tearing up the ground. Then come more machines smoothing it down again. Then comes the tar; then come the rollers. It all moves at a good smart pace. Behind comes a little man walking along, painting a white line...
...difficulties are complicated by the shoals of odd fish that abound in even so small a puddle as Farbridge. There are "fierce, gay anarchists," mothers of prodigies, blustering M.P.s, professional yokels, degenerate nobility, gumshoes in broom closets, harridans in cholers, blond giants with Chinese grandmothers, hard-faced Communists who gnaw rock-cakes at their meetings; in all, as fair a mess of stage Englishmen as have recently been caught in one volume...
...have broken." A wall of brown, log-choked water bears down on him. "He staggers and falls, but the groan he gives is drowned by peals of thunder," and his carcass is smashed to bits as the flood hurtles it along. The reason elephant remains are seldom found: porcupines gnaw away the tusks to get at the nerve pulp, other scavengers destroy whatever else remains...