Word: last-ditch
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...gained eight pounds during "retirement." From his mountain hideout overlooking a black sand beach on Formosa's southern coast, he had come to give counsel and approval to plans for converting the island into a Nationalist redoubt. China's war had entered a phase of last-ditch peripheral resistance. In the far Northwest, Moslem Warlord Ma Pufang was using his hard-riding horsemen to harry the Communist inland flank (TIME, June 27). From Formosa the Gimo's remnant navy and air force, carrying on a blockade of sorts, were needling the Communist coastal flank...
...corn tassels and ear shoots to control fertilization, called him "Crazy Lester." To keep up his experiments he mortgaged everything he owned. When depression hit, he stalled off bankruptcy only by ducking meetings of his creditors. One day he went to an El Paso bank to plead for a last-ditch loan. Unwrapping a newspaper, he produced a ten-inch ear of corn, the best that any other Woodford County farmer had grown. Then he held up a handsome 14-inch ear of Pfister corn grown from hybrid seed. He got the loan...
...more disturbed by the new words than by the old things they signify, nationalists and lingual purists have long resisted the verbal invasion, to less & less avail. Last week, admitting defeat on the spoken front, a group called the Commission for the Preservation of Spanish launched a last-ditch counteroffensive by invoking a long-dormant law regarding billboards...
Humphrey's voice gets lower and his forehead furrows deeper as the trial pushes its way through an unusually accurate court-fight; he almost gets the guy off except for the last-ditch try of a suitably cynical district attorney who comes through for law-and-order with a witness-stand confession. The picture is populated with Bogart's standard collection of pool-sharks, fifty-year old newsboys named "Junior," and punch-drunk bartenders, but the big star is the camera, which pokes behind garbage cans, into alleyways, and peers around the courtroom with far more than usual perception...
...secret weapon: recordings of telephone conversations during the campaign, in which many state leaders had been put on record as approving Dewey's campaign strategy. "Blackmail," cried his opponents. Said Scott, scrambling metaphors right & left: "Age must have its fling. The cliffhangers are making a last-ditch fight . . . My view is that the party has a choice of going back to Garfield or forward to victory." At 48, Hugh Scott was the youngest of the Republican committee brasshats and one of the few with a World War II record...