Word: scratch
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...m.p.h. and its rockets are cut off. Split seconds later, a pair of iss-mm. howitzers beside the track blast away at the decelerating sled. Their shells, moving at 1,088 m.p.h., quickly catch up with the target, slam into it, and are stopped with scarcely a scratch by a bale of synthetic rubber. Then the sled itself splashes to a stop in a trough of water...
...capital resources and a technically innocent labor force. Since the free-enterprising government of Premier Constantine Karamanlis took office in 1954, it has stabilized the drachma and set Greece on the course toward industrialization. The economy is still lopsidedly agrarian. More than half of the 8,400,000 Greeks scratch out a living on uneconomic fruit, tobacco and cotton farms; 8% of the non-farm labor force is jobless, and 25% of those on the land are "underemployed...
...young party recruits : their initiation into Nazi-type brutality. Scared and disgusted, one starts to stutter, another has an attack of diarrhea, a third gouges his eye. An orphan, reminded of his parents' grave, tears up the cemetery more ferociously than anyone else, "as though he wanted to scratch the buried bones out of the ground...
...between Bohlen and John Foster Dulles; the Secretary of State paid little heed to his ambassador's advice about the Russians. In 1957, against Bohlen's wishes, President Dwight Eisenhower pulled him out of Moscow and made him Ambassador to the Philippines. There, though he started from scratch, Bohlen did a typically professional job, helped maintain U.S. -Philippine ties at a time when the island nation was trying to become less dependent on its old supporter and ally...
Empson's endless explications are often ingenious, just as often capricious. "Unexplained beauty always arouses an interest in me," Empson once irreverently wrote, "a sense that this could be a good place to scratch." By close analysis, Empson has washed away many misreadings of poetry; by showing how varied and inventive poets are, he has often made them more exciting. But he may also frighten off readers who translate his lesson as: if you think you understand a poem, there is something wrong with you−or the poem. As a result, many a reader has felt that poetry...