Word: matchwood
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...children or evil men. The squealing children obligingly dashed about, pointing where he was. "There-there-next to the window!" Crash went stones, hymnbooks, everything throwable, until not a pane of glass was left. "There he goes-under the pulpit!" The heaving, frantic mothers reduced the pulpit to matchwood. But Tikoloshe skipped off to another hiding place, and in a matter of minutes the inside of the church was a ruin...
When the sun reappeared at noon the next day, 109 people were dead. Thousands of men, women, and children, their homes beaten to matchwood, moved into churches, schools, hospitals. Damage, including windblown, flooded sugar cane and bananas, reached an estimated $56 million. Power lines had been knocked down and railroad tracks uprooted. The historic old town of Port Royal had been all but obliterated; only six habitable dwellings were still standing. And 76 convicts were at large; the 130-m.p.h. hurricane had toppled a penitentiary wall...
...through some 2½ million feet of U.S. Navy combat film. The results-in both black & white and Technicolor-are breathtaking. Some of the shots, which moviegoers will remember from wartime newsreels-of planes toppling across a flight deck like gasoline torches and of Kamikazes dissolving into smoke and matchwood 100 yards from the carrier's bridge-have the effect of recurring nightmares. Equally effective, except for the muttering background music, are the crowded shots of a carrier's communications room, the intricate, knotted nerve center of the battle...
...farmland and gnawed at its retaining dikes, the people of Vanport got a warning: the Columbia was 15 feet above flood level, highest in 54 years. It might overflow. One afternoon it did. The railroad fill protecting Vanport broke suddenly, and Vanport's jerry-built structures crumpled like matchwood under 15 feet of muddy water. In the wild scramble for safety, wives were separated from husbands, mothers from children. Bewildered and shocked, survivors told of seeing "hundreds" trapped by splintering walls or crushed by floating wreckage. Men hacked at the roofs of broken buildings looking for the missing, divers...
Critic. In Clinton, Iowa, impetuous Ezra Adams explained to a judge that irritation at a soap opera had prompted him to 1) ram his fist through the family radio, 2) hack the set to matchwood with a hammer, 3) hurl eggs at random around the room...