Word: taut
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Crackling rifle shots and a couple of ropes yanked taut in Europe last week, and a few old debts were paid...
...with plotting a rightist coup against the coalition government, they were sentenced to a hanging a la Hongroise. In this procedure, the condemned man stands on a stool before a high post topped by a hook. A thin rope is put about the victim's neck and pulled taut about the hook. Then the stool is kicked from under the victim. His neck is not broken by the drop. As a measure of mercy, the executioner sharply twists the victim's head while a couple of assistants pull his legs down...
...five Army camps; two British officers and a Jewish civilian were killed. (In London a bomb was found in the Colonial Office; its crude timing device failed to explode it.) Irgun announced that it would take ten British lives for each of its "soldiers" hanged. Palestine was taut. The Army's showdown with the terror gangs seemed to be at hand...
Their nerves taut from worry and lack of sleep, a good number of students will resent the ubiquitous exam proctor as he casually walks around the room and stays close to people going out for a cigarette. The reason there is no honor system at Harvard is not because the students are immature or dishonest, but because the College has many men and little social compactness. Another reason is that the complaints have never been very loud...
...July 20 attempt failed for just as unpredictable reasons. The bomb exploded as planned (it was of the same type as the airplane bomb, timed not by telltale clockwork but by the action of acid on a taut wire). Also as planned, Hitler was in the room. At the moment of the explosion he was leaning on the map table under which the bomb had been planted. A few seconds before, however, someone had slightly shifted Stauffenberg's briefcase, so that, instead of lying practically at Hitler's feet, it lay behind a table leg. The day, moreover...