Word: shotgunful
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...overwhelming majority of teen births in the '50s thus occurred in a connubial context, and mainly to girls 17 and over. Twenty and 30 years ago, if an unwed teenager should, heaven forbid, become pregnant, chances are her parents would see that she was swiftly married off in a shotgun wedding. Or, if marriage was impractical, the girl would discreetly disappear during her confinement, the child would be given up for adoption, and the matter would never be discussed again in polite company. Abortion, of course, was not a real option for most until 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled...
...this has changed. Today if a girl does not choose to abort her pregnancy (and some 45% of teenagers do), chances are she will keep the baby and raise it without the traditional blessings of marriage. "The shotgun marriage is a relic of the past," observes Mark Testa, of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. With teen marriages two to three times as likely to end in divorce, he explains, "parents figure, why compound their mistake?" In 1950 fewer than 15% of teen births were illegitimate. By 1983 more than half were, and in some regions of the country...
...prepare by taking military and survival training and stockpiling weapons and food. John Harrell of Louisville, Ill., wealthy head of the Christian Patriots Defense League, who teaches that "Caucasians are the most proven, most capable" of racial groups, recommends that every family of followers "have a 12-gauge shotgun, a .22 rifle and at least 500 rounds of ammunition...
...something like that, I knew something was wrong. So I said, ‘Can you play?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t think I can take a snap, but I can go shotgun.’ And right then I knew...
...yoga stretches, Jacqueline McKenzie will listen to her language tapes. You'd think the 37-year-old graduate of Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Art would be a dab hand at American accents by now, but you try saying such lines as "statistically significant disease cluster" in impeccable shotgun Seattle-style. As agent Diana Skouris in the Francis Ford Coppola-produced TV sci-fi series The 4400, McKenzie does that and more. The highest-rating debut on U.S. cable last year, and a surprise hit from Australia to the U.K., the show introduced agent Skouris exercising on a treadmill...