Word: remnant
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...lords' new course of conquest. They decided to turn east, to capture Midway Island (1,300 miles northwest of Pearl Harbor) and use this outpost as an advance base for Japanese air patrols. As naval strategists they calculated that the attack would draw out the last remnant of the U.S. fleet-including those annoying U.S. flattops that had escaped the Pearl Harbor massacre...
...make leaders hard to find, ideas scarce, and decisions difficult to make. ("This government," said one of the U.S. officials anxiously trying to help, "is stuck together by Scotch tape, bits of string and putty.") The French, striving to maintain by fair means and by sly means a remnant of influence and profit in the land they have exploited for seven decades, obstruct him with the wily rearguard maneuvers of colonialism...
There are important practical reasons, as well as legal precedents, for extending recognition to Red China. One main advantage to the U.S. would be a likely rise in U.S. prestige among neutral Asian nations. Newly independent Asians tend to look upon Chiang's government as a remnant of a corrupt, colonial past--a past that for them the Communist seem to have destroyed. Asian nations like India, Burma, and Indonesia should be more willing to listen to U.S warning about the dangers of Red China if they do not think we are clinging to a discredited past...
Vanishing Breeds. When the first count was run on Christmas Day in 1900, birds were getting scarcer in the U.S. The great auk and Labrador duck were gone; the umbrageous flocks of passenger pigeons were reduced to a pathetic aviary remnant; the trumpeter swan seemed likely to be silenced forever. Then came bird-protection laws and treaties. Although these are still not fully enforced, nearly all the once-threatened birds have come back, some in greater numbers than ever before. Birders, as bird watchers call themselves, have multiplied with the birds. Only a handful of the watchers are professional ornithologists...
Glass in the Gum. Such biweekly settos are a "reformed" remnant of medieval tournaments in which Thai warriors jousted with sword and lance from the backs of elephants. Once a man was unseated, the fight was finished on foot, without weapons. After a while Thais stopped bothering with elephants and did all their scrapping hand to hand. Fighters took to wrapping their fists and forearms with cotton twine, dipping the resulting gauntlets into gum and sprinkling them liberally with broken glass. Before a fight, the gum was allowed to harden until a man's arm became a club. There...