Word: maidening
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...poets and kings, actors and novelists, rode the great ships between the Western continents. Rockefellers, Astors, and Vanderbilts wore white tie and tails to the captain's gala, nibbled caviar in the lounges and sipped champagne on the promenade decks, their long-gowned ladies at their sides. A maiden voyage was an epochal social event...
...last week's maiden transatlantic crossing of the Queen Elizabeth 2 (oneway fares: $490 to $3,000), the VIP list read like a page from the London telephone directory and the formal wear was mostly rented. Newspaper reporters divided their attention between F.D.R.'s youngest son John and a passenger notable chiefly for having made 22 previous crossings. Desperately, they wove vignettes from such unpromising material as the pet white mouse in a first-class stateroom, the ship's minor collision with a whale, and a vicar selling oak trees to reforest Sherwood Forest. With the weather...
...thick of the melee was Bernadette, newly elected M.P. from Ulster, and she went straight from the barricades to her maiden appearance in the House of Commons. Her plane from Belfast was delayed by a bomb scare, and she arrived exhausted but fighting. She landed with the proclamation that she had come "to knock sense into Harold Wilson." The British press had already made her a celebrity, and Westminster was packed, with long waiting lines outside, when Bernadette, in a new, striped blue, mauve and green sweater-dress purchased that morning in Piccadilly, took her seat in the back benches...
...Fudging. As legend has it, the British marbling tourney traces its heritage to the days of Elizabethan chivalry. For the hand of a maiden, two 16th century swains clashed in an "all known sports" tournament in which marbles, for reasons now obscure, became the dominant contest. By the 1700s the marble tournament had become an annual Good Friday ritual in Tinsley Green. The tourney began in the morning; at high noon (the hour Sussex taverns open), the referee cried "Smug!" and the tournament ended. The rules are wondrously simple: 49 marbles are placed in the "pitch" (ring) and each member...
...eyes of the British and the French, the Concorde supersonic jet that made its maiden flight last week is far more than the newest transport to take to the air. The plane is a gamble for enormous stakes; Paris and London together have invested more than $1.5 billion in the plane, nearly triple the original estimate, and have budgeted $600 million more for initial production. On the Concorde rides much of the future of the aeronautical industries of both France and Britain, as well as the possibility of further industrial partnerships between the two countries. Sales of the plane could...