Word: rasp
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...largely to endless repeats that bring him in continuing fees, known in the trade as "residuals," he makes about $300,000 a year. He can imitate anything from the cry of a loon to the whining drawl of a mountaineer, run effortlessly through all the categories of voice quality-rasp, strain, fog, nasal, sinus. He can shift ground from tight-lipped British to loose-lipped Brooklynese to American rural, and run analytically through the ages of man, making his voice grow older as he progresses from the breathiness of childhood to the cracking articulations of the elderly...
...worked its way up the Welland Canal past Niagara Falls, the repulsive eellike creature has been swarming in the lakes. With its round, suckerlike mouth lined with concentric rows of small, sharp teeth, it makes its living by attaching itself to the side of an unlucky fish. Its teeth rasp a hole; its powerful saliva corrodes the fish's flesh and keeps its blood flowing freely. Many fish die of a single lamprey attack...
...Picaresque Captain Boisfeuras decided that Communist propaganda works because "it touches something deep, something real, in a man." Cerebral Captain Esclavier concluded that the West in its colonial wars suffers "from conscience and remorse; that's why we're losing." What is needed to win. declared Colonel Raspèguy, is shrewd, cunning missionaries "who preach, but keep one hand on the butts of their revolvers in case anyone interrupts them-or happens to disagree...
Bidet Civilization. Back in France after the Indo-China war, the paratroop officers are sickened by the "civilization of the Frigidaire and the bidet." They welcome the Algerian rebellion, and. under Colonel Raspèguy. take over the misfits and mutineers of the 10th Paratroop Regiment, determined to turn them into "Communists" who are antiCommunist. For two months, the regiment is molded by forced marches and the blare of loudspeakers that ceaselessly extol "us" and denounce "them," i.e.. anyone who is not a paratrooper...
...novel's end, the paratroop officers are subpoenaed in connection with charges that some of them had tortured prisoners. The officers are outraged. Colonel Raspèguy defiantly tells his staff that whenever Cabinet ministers or Deputies visited his headquarters, he had flatly told them: "'We're doing this job because your government has ordered us to, but it repels and disgusts us.' And now these same bastards are trying to haul us into court! Hold tight to your guns, then no one will come to bother...