Word: straighten
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...late as the Depression, Americans starved. "In the wet hay of leaking barns," wrote John Steinbeck, "old people curled up in corners and died that way, so that the coroners could not straighten them." About 2,000 Americans still die yearly from diseases of malnutrition, and many of the poor are poorly fed. The official U.S. poverty definition is based on the Department of Agriculture's "economy" food plan ("essentially for emergency use"): large helpings of bread, rice, dried beans and peas, cereals, rare servings of meat, no out-of-season or convenience foods...
...soon as the lengthy love scenes are out of the way, the story gets clicking. Alain is a nice young ex-con trying to straighten out with the help of Wife Ann-Margret but with no help at all from his gangster brother. First thing anybody knows, there is poor Alain wrapped up in a plot to heist a million dollars' worth of platinum wire. Double and triple crosses pop in and out as if run through a revolving door, and thriller fans will find a plenitude of such ritual sounds as the squeal of tires, the chunk...
...tires burn under the tremendous torque. The course, usually four to 14 miles long, runs up steep country roads, contains no fewer than 15 curves, and its straightaways are no longer than 200 yds. Yet the cars average 69 m.p.h., occasionally even top 125 m.p.h. Most drivers try to "straighten the curves" by skidding around the corner in a controlled four-wheel slide and then snapping the car into a lightning-like acceleration. Says British Driver Tony Marsh: "You have no chance of winning unless you go absolute flat-out-so that means you are on the ragged edge...
...million worth of exports to the East last year was in the form of grain for Poland and Russia. While this business has helped to pare Western crop surpluses, it has the disadvantage of being a one-shot affair that will quickly end if and when the Communists straighten out their farm mess. Western businessmen are thus looking yearningly toward the more stable business of exporting hard goods to the Communist countries...
...lavished huge sums on industrialization and neglected the vital farm sector, created a vastly inefficient bureaucracy to produce full employment at the expense of the state treasury, and filled his own and his henchmen's pockets with graft. Successive governments have been trying to unscramble the mess and straighten out the Peronistas ever since...