Word: mucking
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Colonel William E. Byrd, the colonial ancestor of Virginia's Senator Harry F. Byrd, named the place the Great Dismal Swamp. After trekking through the muck and mire with a band of hardy surveyors, Byrd emerged bug-bitten almost to death (the Dismal Swamp's yellow fly, they still say, will politely lift a man's hat from his head so as to get a better bite at his ears). The swamp, straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border, just across the James River Bay from Norfolk, was nothing better than a "filthy bogg," he wrote. Even birds...
...America's muddiest rivers. Because of its sewage, silt and salt, the water is not fit for swimming, drinking or irrigation. In fact, the 1,450-mile Arkansas River is good only for the huge channel catfish, which have literally pulled fishermen into its muck...
...shockproof automatic flight recorder carried by all jetliners to record moment-to-moment data on a plane's altitude, speed, gravity forces and direction. But after two days, the flight recorder of American One had not been found, and it may keep its secrets hidden forever in the muck of Jamaica...
...compulsive in their dedication to that American whatever-it-is that so boldly distinguishes us from the other side. Any other group, we mean to say, could quickly and competently--even if quite unconsciously--be drawn into the value system of those people, much as an unthinking speck of muck can be unwittingly scooped into the maw of a Hoover suction machine. But not the YAF: their duty is clear-cut. They must go, in our name, to Helsinki, to watch, observe, calculate, devise, scheme--and perhaps (who can say?) even learn something about the realities of international politics...
...arrives in Arizona, signs on as a ranch hand and runs through the tenderfoot routine-but in style. When she climbs up one side of a horse, she falls down the other. When she tries to wrangle a calf, she ends up flat on her face in the barnyard muck. When she shingles a roof, she rolls off the edge, lands sitting on a pig, rides wildly off into the sunset...