Word: stygian
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Staten Island pier last week the American Graves Registration Service began loading 6,200 new, bronzed-steel coffins aboard a Liberty ship, bound for the battlegrounds of Europe. It was the small beginning of a vast and Stygian job: the return of an estimated 80% of the nation's 251,000 identified war dead, who now lie in cemeteries scattered across four continents, but whose next-of-kin have asked that they be disinterred and brought home for reburial. Estimated undertakers' fees...
...early season problems facing Samborski at the moment, the most embarrassing has been the lack of outdoor practice. The squad's workout yesterday on chilly Soldiers Field was the first time the entire team performed anywhere except in the Stygian gloom of Briggs Cage. Some weeks ago, the coach allowed his outfield to get some pasturage, but yesterday's session was the first opportunity Varsity players have had to bat against a normal background, and to study the intricate gyrations a baseball can perform on natural turf...
There is fantasy, sweeping and bleak, on the top of Baldy Mountain when John the Witch Boy crawls up from his Stygian haunts to search for his mountain lass; tangy amusement at the cracker barrel and at the revival meeting. There is rollicking music from the deep throats of the mountaineers in church, singing "Lonesome Valley" to save a boy and girl who "pleasured themselves" indiscreetly; and there is delicate ballet in an aura of the supernatural when Lista, the Dark Witch, and Croma, the Fair Witch, jealous of Barbara Allen--"we ain't got nothin' again her, only...
...tired of trying to work through the Roman dusk by candle and carbide light.* One afternoon when Britain's High Commissioner, prim Sir Noel Charles, was to call, Visconti-Venosta personally ordered every candle and sputtering carbide light in the Palazzo Chigi doused. Sir Noel walked into Stygian gloom, groped his way through the Chigi's interminable passages and waiting rooms, conferred ghost-to-ghost with Visconti-Venosta. whose face never cracked a smile. Next day Visconti-Venosta wrote Sir Noel a note reviewing the discussions: "As we were saying yesterday in complete darkness. . . ." Sir Noel...
...child's coffin to a strong resemblance to an overcomplicated vacuum cleaner. Its 20-odd feet of wooden tubing are capable of emitting the lowest-sounds known to orchestral music-lower than any at the left end of a piano keyboard. To everybody but a contrabassoonist, its Stygian burps sound like abysmal Bronx cheers...