Word: pitting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...crowds which had jammed the Manhattan courtroom thinned; the jury trying Alger Hiss for perjury relaxed. After ten days of bear-pit tension, the testimony of ex-Communist-Courier Whittaker Chambers and his wife was finally complete. Hulking, flat-voiced Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Murphy hoisted himself into a sitting position on a corner of the Government table and began a careful job of legal bricklaying-matching the "pumpkin papers" and other secret documents with the originals from which they had been copied...
Tense and nervous, speculators crowded the Chicago wheat pit one morning last week, waiting for the opening gong. When it rang, they furiously began waving orders to buy. The price of wheat futures rose by the hour, jumping as much as 8¾? a bushel. Professional speculators, who had been selling wheat short while the price was edging down, took heavy losses...
...auto racer himself, Moore selects his drivers more carefully than a horse trainer selects a jockey. His pit technique is unbeatable. During Holland's one pit stop last week, two front tires were changed and 15 gallons of fuel blown into the tank from pressurized drums in 52 seconds. That was good enough, but it did not equal Moore's own record of 49 seconds for a major pit stop of a winning car, established eight years...
...black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic [like a] sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes . . ." William turned into "a mass of quivering fear" at the thought that "That shape am I. . . potentially," and wondered how people could live "so unconscious of the pit of insecurity beneath the surface of life...
Chase It. Henry James was always conscious of the pit. He set some of his novels directly in its depths, populated many of his short stories with jittery, conscience-prodding ghosts. The 18 stories now brought together into one volume are a notable contribution to the quake-and-quiver school of writing; they are also subtle portraits of people disturbed by their own failures and weaknesses...