Word: pinprick
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Thirty-five British colonies in five continents, and dotting the seven seas, are still ruled directly from Whitehall. Among them are the massive tracts of Tanganyika and Nigeria, the island arcs of the Solomons and the Lesser Antilles, such pinprick naval bases as Malta and Ascension (35 sq. mi.), which was administered for 107 years as one of Her Majesty's warships.* Britain's colonies were picked up, along with the commonwealth, in what the British like to call "a fit of absence of mind." Most of them were the concomitants of sea power and the search...
...Scottish Trappists, Royal Lancers and Fijian dancers. They worship many gods, among them Allah, Buddha, the Christian Trinity, Lutembe the Crocodile of Uganda, and, in some cases, Mammon. They make their homes where birth or the spirit of adventure placed them-on an entire continent, on great islands and pinprick islets, in obscure deserts, tropical jungles, foam-flecked northern fishing villages, places with exotic names like Zanzibar, edible-sounding names like the Cameroons or Tortola, improbable names like Gozo or Piddlehinton, famous ones like St. Helena or Piccadilly. No man among them can fluently speak the tongues of all-Urdu...
...volume must be taken apart and every line of every page put under the microscope. Pinto's toughest example: "a closely printed dictionary, 700 pages in length," brought into Britain by a "Dutch refugee." Not until page 432 did Pinto find what he was looking for -"a tiny pinprick" under one letter. Other pinpricks followed under other letters; when written down in order, they gave the addresses of Nazi agents in Stockholm and Lisbon...
Blackmail. The East's response was not pen notes but pinpricks. The incidents were small: e.g., West Germans were refused interzone passes to Berlin because "American imperialists are trying to split Germany"; British and U.S. patrols were temporarily barred from the no-mile stretch of Autobahn linking Berlin to West Germany. But each pinprick seemed to fit into an ominous Soviet stencil. The Reds were giving West Germans a glimpse of what might happen if they turn down the Soviet offer of "unity." Huffed Walter Ulbricht, East German Deputy Premier: "The day the peace contract is signed, West Berlin...
...sovereignty: the French Parliament ratified the Schuman Plan to pool Europe's coal and steel. One of two traditional enemies was willing to share with the other the very source of power and strength over which they had fought so often. It might be but a mere pinprick in the barrier of distrust. Yet through that pinprick shone a slim ray that might yet light the way to unity in Europe...