Word: trunkful
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This article is designed for the incoming Freshman V-12er who is now unpacking his trunk in Cambridge, secure in the ascetic belief that his next two or three years will be spent with his nose deep in books. It is intended for the Freshman who thinks Harvard is all hard work, who is going to give up going with women and stick to the intellectual discipline of the University. It is for the man who thinks that he will, perforce, be faithful to his home-town love and will never have a chance to relax with the belies...
...admires elephant-foot carpets, likes little ivory jumbos on his desk. Some friends think he has taken on elephant characteristics, among them a stupendous memory. For his headquarters when he commanded Britain's PAI force (Persia & Iraq) he designed an emblem with a rampaging elephant, trunk uplifted...
This is no mean achievement. A toll call, which must be relayed along a maze of loops and trunk lines, usually involves several skilled operators and a number of complex connections. In the new system, an operator in the town where the call originates calls the number by dialing or punching keys on a new kind of switchboard. Instead of plugs, this has a numbered keyboard like an adding machine. The message goes to the mechanical brain, called a "marker," which hunts out an available trunk line, tests a path to the destination and electrically sets up all connections...
...beast was no longer skinny and bag-kneed; its once limp and drooping trunk now swayed with menacing promise. But the G.O.P. elephant mostly drowsed or shifted from foot to foot. Every time the Party seemed about to wake up, a red-faced, elderly mahout named Harrison Spangler tiptoed up and made quiet, shushing nursery-noises until the pachyderm was soothed and drowsy again...
Akers chopped through a bamboo thicket, came face to face with a bull elephant, trunk raised, tusks outthrust. The beast charged, hooking viciously with a tusk, knocked the pilot beneath a bush. Stunned and suffering from a deep wound, Akers eventually regained consciousness. That night he slept under a tree. Late the next morning he dragged himself to safety, told his strange story...