Word: ragtag
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...team for softball, an activity the school disapproved of as dangerous and unfeminine. The game clearly caught her imagination in those early teenage years. She played third base and was cleanup hitter. She was a tough player: in the batter's box, she stared down the pitcher. When the ragtag group played the teachers, she liked to catch their line drives right in front of her face. Recalls an admiring classmate: "She could do things ordinary girls couldn't -- like hit fungoes...
There is no agreement on whether the U.S.-led troops are only to guard supply routes or are to go out and disarm the thousands of ragtag fighters who are terrorizing the country. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali told the Security Council he wanted the intervention force to disarm clan fighters and confiscate their heavy weapons. Officials in Washington said only that they were considering various methods of taking weapons out of circulation, but there was no way all of them could be seized. Nor is January a realistic date for departure: it will be a month before...
Never mind that Macedonia's constitution explicitly disavows any such claim. Or that its army consists of about 6,000 ragtag troops armed with pistols and rifles, while Greece's is more than 25 times larger and is equipped with tanks, heavy artillery and jet fighters. Or that there is neither precedent nor justification in international law for one country to tell another what it can call itself...
...sadder disappointment. The ABC comedy comes from David Lynch and Mark Frost, who shook up network TV with their brilliantly perverse soap opera Twin Peaks. This time the pair have come up with a sitcom about a ragtag TV network in the 1950s. Must have sounded great in the story conferences...
...Germans are a more ragtag outfit. Their command post is a forest hut, and their personnel are either overage or underage -- the last scrapings of a nearly defeated nation's manpower pool. It is they who begin a suit for a separate peace. When they get the drop on some of the G.I.s, they don't fire. To test their intentions, one of the Americans builds a funny snowman-Hitler; the Germans respond by attacking their position -- with snowballs. Next thing you know both sides are singing Christmas carols together, exchanging presents and trying to work...