Word: spining
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Only one page of the tome could be called exciting enough to send a tingle or two up the royal spine as His Majesty sat reading in the bright cosy library at Sandringham. Glowingly Sir George relates how in the latter years of the War he often heard discontented Tommies complain that the Monarchy was not absolute enough. "The talk in barrack rooms," he writes unctuously, "struck the note of unswerving loyalty not to the Constitution but to the person of the King. . . . It might have been comparatively easy at that moment to set up an absolute Dictatorship...
...specimen: a strong, high-backed, Spanish oaken chair equipped with an iron collar and a plunger just beneath. A powerful lever at the back of the chair tightens the collar, strangles the condemned, at the same time forcing the plunger into the back of his neck, dislocating the spine. It was this ingenious antique which Minister of Executions Francisco de Pineda prepared to operate last week with his accustomed deftness, but in very special circumstances...
Golf gave one of Dr. Horace Gray's (Chicago) middle-aged patients a pain in the back. Then another patient came in with the same sort of ache at the base of his spine. And shortly a third. But the last was a polo player. The three were enough for Dr. Gray to decide that he had discovered a new recreational malady - wrenched backs in men between 35 and 45 - and he hastened last week to notify the profession. Quick swings of the polo mallet twist stiffened spines. In golf the cause is the "brisk, snappy twist...
Whether snakes respond instinctively to the charmer's whines and whistles is still an unsettled problem in animal psychology. Snakes have little brain and much spine. They are quick to respond to stimuli, and perhaps react directly to seductive vibrations. More probably their swaying-it is no dance-is a conditioned reflex. Charmers feed their snakes well, in India with milk, flour balls and meat (frogs). And it is doubtless with mounting hope of meals that snakes raise themselves to the fakir's minor music. Charmers who have tried their art in U. S. zoos and serpentaria have...
...sunset edge of the island has been allowed to fall into the hands of cheap-johnny apartment builders and tenants. It was a natural development, however, because, like the swampy eastern edge of the island, the upper bank of the Hudson was less accessible than the island's spine. Also, because the Hudson's bank is the island's natural dock and shipping side. Wharves, warehouses and railroad tracks thrived there and stretched up the island before society or even social convenience made competitive demands. The commercial coagulation on Manhattan's western bank is no stranger...