Word: sprung
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...going steady" at ever younger ages. American youngsters tend to live as if adolescence were a last fling at life, rather than a preparation for it. Historian Arnold Toynbee, for one, considers this no laughing matter, for part of the modern West's creative energy, he believes, has sprung from the ability to postpone adolescents' "sexual awakening" to let them concentrate on the acquisition of knowledge...
...passions aroused by their crimes seem, in retrospect, a chilling echo of the assassinations themselves. Guiteau went raving to the scaffold, where a crowd that had paid as much as $300 each for the pleasure of seeing him hang heard him cry, Glory, glory, glory," as the door was sprung from beneath his feet. Czolgosz was electrocuted only 46 days after McKinley died, and a carboy of sulphuric acid was poured into his coffin afterward, by way of post-mortem punishment. Sergeant Boston Corbett, the soldier who claimed he had killed Booth, in defiance of orders that he be taken...
...wrote T. E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of his World War I dynamiting raids on the Hejaz Railway, the 782-mile "pilgrim express" whose single track linked Damascus with the Islamic holy city of Medina. Lawrence of Arabia reduced most of the line to a snarl of sprung steel and splintered ties. Nearly half a century of desert winds and systematic depredation have done the rest. Bedouins ransacked the abandoned stations, pried loose wooden ties for cooking fires. In Medina the station house is a shell, its doors torn...
This fall came another innovation: the idea-patterned frankly and gratefully on Yale's "Scholars of the House"-that a few bright first classmen (seniors) should be freed to study largely on their own. Called "Trident Scholars," they are picked from the scholastic top 10%, get sprung from routine classes (military duties continue) while pursuing independent research projects. As the academy's unbarnacled superintendent, Rear Admiral Charles C. Kirkpatrick, puts it, the aim is to "give a bright boy his head...
...opening up of new, tillable land, reform has worked. At some of the large ejidos on the dry, rocky central plateaus, resettled peasants now have irrigated fields, modern machinery, new roads to market, radios and refrigerators, and tuition-free trade schools. New villages with thriving shops and markets have sprung up near the farms. The government provides low-interest loans for modern equipment and technical training. Mexican land reform, says the government, is in a "constructive phase," and since 1959 more than 26,000 people have hacked out new farms and villages on tracts of virgin land...