Word: ironical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many of the new words have surprisingly old-fashioned genealogies. People were "mugged" in provincial Lincolnshire as early as 1866, as in "I gave him a sound mugging, he was so chappy." A Mrs. P. Snowden, traveling in Bolshevik Russia, went "behind the Iron Curtain at last" in 1920, a generation before Winston Churchill gave the term currency in a speech at the end of World...
...PUMPING IRON...
...athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous ounce of metal on it!" exclaimed William Dean Howells before the centerpiece of Philadelphia's International Exhibition celebrating our nation's 100th birthday. He was inspired to these words by the gigantic 700-ton Corliss steam engine that towered over Machinery Hall. When President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil turned the levers on May 10, 1876, a festive crowd cheered as the engine set in motion a wonderful as sortment of machines- pumping water, combing wool, spinning cotton, tearing hemp, printing newspapers, lithographing wallpaper, sewing...
...those who want other battles -or other wars-there will be plenty more. Cross of Iron is the story of the German retreat across Russia after Stalingrad; Dog Soldiers revolves around three Viet Nam veterans who become involved with both heroin and the CIA; and The Eagle Has Landed is a fictional account of a German attempt to kidnap Winston Churchill. The towering Tory, a famous old brandy sniffer, would at least like the casting. He is portrayed by the proprietor of the Beehive, a country pub in Kent...
...fortunes of Silver Bay are tied to those of the Reserve Mining Co., which produces 15% of the nation's iron ore by extracting it from the area's flint-hard taconite rock. Reserve also employs 80% of the town's work force. In the late 1960s, U.S. Government scientists concluded that the taconite wastes, or tailings, left over from the extraction process did not sink harmlessly into the depths of Lake Superior as everyone supposed they did. Rather, the scientists said, the 67,000 tons of waste dumped each day contained asbestos-like fibers that contaminated...