Word: recoil
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...young conscript named Reza Bakhshabadi, who held his submachine gun at a level lower than usual. The Shah, trained in arms, was well aware of the technique of firing an automatic weapon: start shooting low and then raise your aim-if you take dead aim the kick of recoil makes shots go too high for accuracy...
...only when opportunity yawns wide. For these reasons, all the talk about blundering into another Korea-type war in Southeast Asia seems to me as idle as is the fear behind it. Palpable risks and dangers are present in such number that if those who make policy recoil from chimeras, they will forfeit what chance remains to help South Viet Nam save herself...
...limited to film available in archives, all of it at least half a century old. The result is too often a barrage of names and statistics, accompanied by endless cycles of grainy newsreel footage: statesmen shake hands, famous field marshals solemnly confer, the 14-in. guns boom and recoil, the tanks rumble, the infantry scatters. And the audience fidgets, uneasily aware that the horrors of war have begun to seem less tragic than tiresome, and that a picture is sometimes less eloquent than a few well-chosen words...
...preparation for a garden party in Kandy, Ripley looked out the window and spotted a Picus chlorolophus wellsi (small green woodpecker) that he needed for his collection. He grabbed his gun, dashed out of his hut wrapped only in a bath towel, and started shooting. The gun's recoil jarred the bath towel off. As the guests, including Lord Louis Mountbatten, gawked at his lanky (6 ft. 3½ in.), naked figure, Ripley enthusiastically retrieved the fallen Picus. After dressing, he urbanely rejoined the party...
Anouilh early looked upon the modern world and found it bad. In his recoil, he stepped back to 1910, the year of his birth. His reading had caused him to believe that the world had held out a promise to him then that it had long since slapped out of his hands. Many of his plays, as a result, are set around 1910, and still more have an Edwardian flavor even if they are contemporary. His plays often express nostalgia for hope and optimism in the spirit of a young girl (as in The Rehearsal), countering it with examples...