Word: hairbreadths
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...doing, and correct themselves if necessary. But most businessmen lump under automation all automatic machines and processes, including the giant tools that follow directions punched on a tape, huge computers that make thousands of intricate mathematical calculations in a fraction of a second, gauges that check fractions of a hairbreadth with a tiny beam of light...
...show of unruffled calm and laid the cornerstone for a new municipal hospital. At the same time Cubans added a new word to their vocabularies, inspired by Aureliano Sánchez Arango's fifth escape from arrest: it was aurelianada, meaning an escape carried out in a hairbreadth, spine-tingling manner...
Fellow airmen called him "Earthquake McGoon"-the burly, black-browed man with the big laugh and the outspoken contempt for the quiet life. Earthquake was born to trouble and hairbreadth escapes...
...room was tense as the vote was taken. Only after a recount was the Wilson motion voted down by a hairbreadth: 109-111. The revolt, biggest since the war against the Labor leadership, was not confined to Bevanites. It included many victims of two costly world wars, who deeply distrusted putting guns into the hands of Germans; many who worried that the rearmed Germans might attempt to reunite with East Germany by force and set off another war; some who argued (like Bevan) that the West had gone to Berlin unwilling to bargain away the twelve West German divisions...
Navarre organized a spy and counterspy ring which was never uncovered during the Nazi occupation, although he had a series of hairbreadth escapes. Once, when he had a rendezvous with an agent in Paris' gloomy old Gare St. Lazare, the man failed to appear. He had been seized by the Germans, and they had squeezed out of him the word of the appointment with Navarre. There were six Gestapo men in the station looking for the spymaster. But Navarre, scenting the new wind, coolly joined a long line of ticket buyers, stood on a crowded platform reading a newspaper...