Word: squate
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strategic places on the rim of California's San Joaquin Valley, men kneel in gravelike pits. Camouflaged with grass, they await their prey. A stillborn calf lies as bait within inches of each of the earthen blinds. Nearby, other men squat beside a row of four metal cannons, ready to fire weights attached to a 40-ft. by 50-ft. net. Frustrated, they all scan the sky, hoping that the wintry clouds collecting on the horizon do not close in. The 20-lb. Gymnogyps californianus rarely seeks food on stormy days...
...waiting on the platform, there was a woman in a sari reading the matrimonial ads in the English- language newspaper India Abroad, looking at one "inviting correspondence" for "a well-educated professional with a green card." Next to her a woman from Viet Nam folded herself into the sit-squat of Southeast Asia, while she spooned American mashed pears into a baby in a folding stroller. Farther along the platform, a woman from Nicaragua, now a U.S. citizen, explained the subway system to her niece. The older woman, in secret and at great expense, had retrieved her niece the week...
...modern battle gear and the precision drill of troops from all branches of the Soviet forces. The 45-minute spectacle was the largest display of military might in the Soviet capital since a similar anniversary in 1965, and included military equipment never seen before in a Moscow parade: squat T-64 tanks, short-range (75 miles) SS-21 missiles and M1976 field guns. Marshal Sergei Sokolov, the Defense Minister, gave the keynote speech. "Capitalist propaganda is making strenuous efforts to falsify history . . . to belittle the role of the U.S.S.R. in the rout of the fascist invaders," he declared...
Witness Jack's seemingly innocent chore of taking out the Gladney garbage: Was this ours? Did it belong to us? I took the bag out to the garage and emptied it. The compressed bulk sat there like an ironic modern sculpture, massive, squat, mocking ... I picked through it item by item, mass by shapeless mass, wondering why I felt guilty, a violator of privacy, uncovering intimate and perhaps shameful secrets. Why did I feel like a household spy? Is garbage so private? Does it glow at the core with personal heat, with signs of one's deepest nature, clues...
Congress has a proud history of conflict resolution. Lawmakers occasionally settled things at ten paces, until William Graves of Kentucky killed Jonathan Cilley of Maine in 1839, prompting Congress to pass an antidueling law. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, a master of invective, once derided a colleague as a "noisome, squat and nameless animal." In 1856 Preston Brooks, a South Carolina Congressman bent on avenging an insult to an infirm uncle in the Senate, came upon Sumner from behind and, guttapercha cane in hand, beat him senseless on the Senate floor. Brooks resigned but was immediately voted back into office...