Word: isthmus
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...past year Canal Zone electricians have also found the charred remains of kinkajous, opossums, sloths and monkeys along their wires. A few years ago two parakeets exchanged what has been called history's hottest kiss on the trans-isthmus high-tension line. The parakeets, one on a grounded wire and the other on a live one, touched bills, doused the lights in the Zone. Linemen found them next morning-two tiny fried fowl with bills still touching...
Young Panama's vocabulary contains only a part of the Americanisms that have invaded the everyday Spanish of the Isthmus, mainly by infiltration from the English-speaking Canal Zone. Other beachheads, on subjects ranging from elegant eating (at a dinerdans) to economic blockade (boicot), include chingongo (chewing gum), guachiman (watchman), daim (dime), bichicomer, the verbs blofear (to bluff) and quidnapear, the meaningful noun...
Thousands of Argonauts found bitter disappointment in California; other thousands died without ever getting there. Those who chose the long trip around Cape Horn (best time: 89 days) risked storms and shipwreck; on the land-and-water route via the Isthmus of Panama (33 to 35 days), the perils included yellow fever and cholera. By the Overland and Santa Fe Trails, over which 50,000 traveled in 1849 alone, the trip could take all spring and all summer-and the gold seeker, plodding onward beyond the alkali desert in the Humboldt Valley, thought himself lucky to get across the Sierras...
...Editor Jackson's collection begins with pastoral glimpses of California, includes the early accounts of the discovery of gold, and scenes along the various routes-the Lassen Road, the Salt Lake-Los Angeles road, the southwestern route through Santa Fe, Tucson and Fort Yuma, the route across the Isthmus, the voyages around the Cape. It includes as well such unexpected items as eleven pages of the work of two Cuban artists, Augusto Ferran and Jose Baturone, whose quaintly bearded, drunken and belligerent miners, drawn from life in San Francisco, bear a vague resemblance to the Seven Dwarfs...
...buzzard, coasting high in the air over Central America last week, would have seen nothing unusual. The mountainous, forest-matted isthmus lay quietly in the greasy November sun. Among the many human realities invisible to the buzzard were the boundary lines-the imaginary but very actual barriers that said: "This is Costa Rica; this is Guatemala; this is Nicaragua...