Word: prop
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sitting inches from the prop wash of his UH-1H ("Huey") helicopter, Salvadoran Army Colonel Julio César Yánez López stared with satisfaction at the thin plumes of smoke coiling across the scrubby landscape below. "We're fighting terrorists, not guerrillas with a noble cause," he announced as the chopper settled to earth alongside a cornfield crackling with flames. "We're going to integrate Usulután back into the economic life of this country...
Casually dressed in white shirt and blue trousers, he hurries down the aisle like a schoolboy late for the class-play tryouts, afraid the best parts may have already been cast. But when he mounts the bare stage-its only prop a battered chair that once had pretensions to the regal-a sense of awe seems to overcome...
Murray recalls one occasion when Victor Garber, portraying a lecherous real estate agent in Nothing On, inadvertently placed the prop wine bottle two inches away from its appointed spot: "This meant that Douglas Scale [the pixilated burglar] couldn't reach it. Doug brushed it, knocked it over. I reached for it, fumbled it and dropped it between us. We're talking a couple of inches, but that's crucial. The audience is suspended on a tightrope with us. If we stop, they lose their involvement...
...banner was in English, which probably reduced its readership in Kabul but certainly suggested something else: the broadcast was intended not so much to persuade Soviet audiences of U.S. perfidy as to distract Western attention from the historic day when nearly 100,000 Soviet troops rolled into Afghanistan to prop up a faltering pro-Soviet regime...
Nonetheless, he maintained, the U.S. already has something like industrial policy in place. Federal, state and local authorities are giving large grants to prop up aging industries and encourage new ones. The Administration has proposed merging trade officials now spread around several federal agencies into a single department that would be modeled after Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry. In addition, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency is expected to spend nearly $1 billion by the end of the decade to help firms look into supercomputers and other hightechnology areas. "We have all kinds...