Word: stirrup
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...shaped metal blocks that locked into a track used to guide the heavy scaffolding that carries window washers up and down the outside of the giant structure. He was roped to the blocks, and each of his boots rested in a strap that acted like a kind of stirrup. To go up a foot or so, Willig used a pulley system. He would move one block as high as he could reach and hoist himself up. Then he would unhitch the lower block, attach it above his head and repeat the whole procedure...
Another story, equally indicting, involves the now-famous jockey Valery Giscard-d'Estaing. D'Estaing fell from his horse while taking the second turn at Aqueduct. Despite the dead weight of the rider, hanging unharmed from a stirrup, his horse went on to win by 15 furlongs...
...seemed a storm in a stirrup cup. "Columbus was overridden and possibly even terrified," declared an outraged TV viewer of the Badminton horse trials in Gloucestershire. Animal Lover Jean Pyke was attacking Captain Mark Phillips for his handling of the hunter that had been lent to him by his mother-in-law for the grueling three-day contest of dressage, show and cross-country jumping. A big gray, Columbus had galloped off with the Whitbread Trophy to the delight of Winner Mark and Owner Queen Elizabeth, and the wifely acquiescence of Princess Anne, who placed fourth in the event. Mark...
...rich sunlight that pours copiously on gleaming mountains. But the book's cumulative power lies in appalling battle details. Heads sail briskly from necks and are hoisted on pikes. A Montenegrin grabs a Turk's horse and tries frantically to kick a severed leg out of the stirrup. During a lunch break between bashing feet and smashing kidneys, an unforgettable father-son torture team laments the passing of the good old days when they did not have to worry about leaving scars...
...most advanced gadgets which any civilization has possessed." More important, states swollen by conquest can support a leisure class without which, the author maintains, science and the arts might never have arisen. He points out that technological progress makes its greatest strides under the prod of war, from the stirrup designed by 2nd century Asian warrior horsemen to the sophisticated creations of the last two world wars. From the 1916 tank evolved the bulldozing tractor. World War II was a veritable cornucopia: the first aerosol bomb, radar, the jet aircraft engine, and the ballistic missiles that, a scant generation later...