Word: scrubbing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Except for occasional maneuvering armies, the only people who ever lingered on the scrub-and cactus-sprinkled sand dunes of northeastern Sinai were Bedouin tribesmen. That will soon change. Within the next two months, Israeli surveyors-to be followed by bulldozers and construction workers-will begin charting the site for a new city in a 40-sq.-mi. strip of coastal land below the Gaza border town of Rafah in a corner of the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. By the end of 1974, a settlement large enough to support 350 families will have been built...
...chaotic days of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, millions of youthful Red Guards were unleashed by Mao Tse-tung to scrub China clean of prerevolutionary ideas. Instead, the Red Guards nearly wrecked the country, and had to be suppressed by the army. Now Mao is turning to youth again. Apparently the Chairman feels that its energy-if carefully controlled by party cadres-can spur the dragging campaign to rid China of revisionist "poison" spread by Lin Piao, Mao's former heir apparent...
There was also scrub baseball, in which the littlest kid was allowed to play "pigtail," meaning that he stood behind the catcher and retrieved all the passed balls. There were boat races on nearby Crystal Lake, where the air was afume with adult cigar smoke ("One of the great disappointments of my life has been the fact that no cigar ever tasted as good as that cigar smoke used to smell there by Crystal Lake"). Of course there was a high school play. In a performance of Peg o' My Heart, Bruce was called upon by the script...
Downgrading of certain tasks completely disregards the dramatic possibilities of almost any career. We may rant against toil, and yet we were created for it. While deploring job hardships, we doggedly scrub and paint at home to enhance the family image. Prolonged inactivity leaves us mean or deadened...
...script borrows from fantasy and often only the excellent acting prevents the film from plummeting into absurdity: "Have you looked into the mirror lately," a whorehouse madam mockingly asks an adolescent Billie who has misinterpreted a job offer. But, in only a few short scenes, the skinny pig-tailed scrub-girl makes an unexplained Cinderella transformation into the most glamorous lady of the night on the block...