Word: piggybacker
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...sandbags to plug holes in the dikes; helicopters fluttered over drowning villages picking up survivors and dropping milk for starving infants. In Hamburg, Danish frogmen dived beneath the waters to hunt for bodies: for six hours two Bundeswehr soldiers stood in shoulder-deep water holding two children piggyback. The parents of the children finally succumbed to exhaustion and slipped beneath the flood tide. It was so cold that many people froze to death on rooftops before rescuers arrived...
...prospects for a tunnel grew brighter and brighter, French truckers became alarmed that the rail-only link might cut their earnings by forcing them to piggyback through the tunnel. Joined by British and French steelmakers, who stand to sell about 800,000 tons of steel if a bridge is built, the truckers set up a pro-bridge group headed by shrewd, forceful Jules Moch, last Interior Minister of France under the Fourth Republic...
...network of "word watchers"-avid amateurs with Sprachgefühl (feeling for speech), who constantly peruse novels, menus, labels, ticket stubs, and even small-town news paper accounts of obscure murders. The head of Merriam's own shipping department, for example, is the part-time scholar who netted piggyback, as used in railroad freight hauling...
...which first appeared in dictionaries in 1947. Most insidious breeders are public relations experts, adept at spawning the punch word that sums up an organization, then, to fit its letters, turning out an often fatuous full title. Examples: WAIF (Women's Adoption International Fund) and the recently launched piggyback acronym YOU (Youth Out for UNICEF). Last week Mississippi segregationists coined yet another: SAFE, meaning Southern Action for Expansion...
Even before the ruling, piggybacking volume had trebled since 1955. While other carloadings were declining, there were 554,000 flatcar piggyback trips last year. Barring a reversal in the courts, the new decision should enable the railroads to regain a substantial percentage of the nation's freight business. Railroad men see almost unlimited possibilities for a sensible idea with the awkward name of "containerization"-moving a sealed cargo container from door to door without any repackaging of its contents. Though the Teamsters charge that piggybacking is designed to destroy the trucking industry entirely, the railroads are already cooperating with...