Word: rubes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After decades of piecemeal revision and patchwork repair, the U.S. welfare system resembles nothing so much as a vast Rube Goldberg money machine. Long under attack by conservatives because of its cost (more than $6 billion a year for all levels of Government), the welfare colossus has lately received its most telling blows from liberals, who accuse it of subverting the very people it is supposed to sustain. It seems hardly possible that the system could be made more inequitable or inefficient, but that is exactly what the U.S. House of Representatives appeared to have accomplished last week...
Compared with the V-L, the conventional rifle is a Rube Goldberg contraption. When the trigger is squeezed on a conventional weapon, the cocked firing hammer strikes a primer cap in the cartridge, setting off a primer charge. That in turn ignites the powder, which explodes and drives the bullet through the barrel but leaves the spent cartridge-and a trail of incompletely burned powder-behind. The cartridge must then be pulled out of the firing chamber by a bolt mechanism and ejected...
...last week, and no one under 50 can fully appreciate what it meant. It became America's national saga, all the more classic because its hero was to be shadowed by tragedy and did not prove to be free of flaws. "Slim" Lindbergh looked like the original country rube, with cowlick and baggy breeches, and he stirred folk memories; there was about him something of the raggedy fellow at the Sherwood tournament who outshoots the sheriff's best archers...
...Betty Comden; Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein as a fancy-free and slightly before-its-time first-effort, has settled down into comfortable period-piecedom. Quincy House has revived this product from the age of Chiquita Banana and has missed little of the charm of a show about three rube sailors who fall in love with three city girls while on 24-hour leave in New York...
...have steel-rimmed wooden wheels. Since the Viet Cong are truck-poor, their Chinese 75-mm. recoilless rifle, which was designed for vehicle mounting, comes simply on two wheels so that it can be dragged overland manually. Then there are the even more rustic land mines, booby traps and Rube Goldberg-style gadgetry that the Viet Cong sometimes seem to prefer even to their newly acquired modern amenities. Not long ago, an American patrol near a 1st Air Cavalry base in the Central Highlands came across a monster crossbow hidden in the jungle. It was cocked at the sky, ready...