Word: snailing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...morning of Armistice Day, Colmar, Alsace, beheld a strange parade. Hundreds of snails crept through the streets. They were smeared under the wheels of traffic; they squished under the boots of Nazi troops, who finally pressed snickering Frenchmen into service as street cleaners. Across the shell of every snail was painted the red, white & blue of the Tricolor...
Past the first tee of the Memphis Country Club the convoy moved at a snail's pace. Along the walk bordering the course strolled a group of girls in shorts. From the trucks came a drumfire of soldiers' shouts-"Yoo-Hoo-o-o"-"Hi, baby"-a fanfare of whistling...
...That Benny's as crooked as a corkscrew's shadow. He's lower than a snail's outlook...
Thousands of years ago, somewhere on the warm seacoasts of the North American continent, an Indian picked up a sea snail's shell, blew a tentative toot. He had a horn. Perhaps he did not catch on at once, but his horn was tuned naturally to a pentatonic (five-note) scale. The Indian and his friends contrived other instruments to thump and tootle with the snail's shell. By the time the Aztec civilization was at its height, and the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the Indians were playing teponaxtles (wooden cylinders, with tongues inside producing two different notes...
...proof Composer Chavez could give that his fanciful reconstruction called Xochi-pili-Macuilxochitl after the Aztec god of music, the dance, flowers, love-was the real stuff. But it really sounded like an Aztec jam session. Flutes and pipes shrilled and wailed, a trombone (subbing for the snail shell) neighed an angular melody, to the spine-tingling thump-and-throb of drums, gourds, rattles. Xochipili-Macuil-xochitl sounded almost as primitive as Stravinsky...