Word: tug
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Shrewd was scarcely the word for Adams when he arrived in Paris early in 1780 to take up his duties as U.S. peace commissioner. He was green, scared, pompous, moralistic and tactless. Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister, who intended to be "master of the peace," gave a sharp tug on the purse strings and "persuaded" the Continental Congress to divide its peacemaking powers among five commissioners.* A little later he also forced Congress to instruct its commissioners "to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace without the knowledge and concurrence of the ministers of France." To make sure these incapacitating...
...second wife Peggy and Richard, her 11-year-old son. While Joey mows the unkempt fields, the two women guardedly, and then unguardedly, spar over him, a prize that neither of them seems to want as much as they want simply to contest for its possession. The tug of war is academic anyway...
...company lawyer, a doctor and a hyperthyroid magazine editor (Sandy Baron) to thwart the ultranatural-childbirth plot. This keeps the stage busy, but what keeps the play moving is undrying freshets of laughter, the limber comic pacing of Director Gene Saks, and the abrasive tension of the generational tug-of-war. The son-in-law's nose is keener than his intelligence. He scents corruption in every institution, but he demands a kind of impossible social purity, something akin to repealing the Industrial Revolution. The father has permitted an urgent sense of familial responsibility to blur his ethics...
...Street. North of the seaport of Valparaiso, two hills suddenly collapsed into mud, trapping a 700-passenger train between them. At Vina del Mar, seaside playground of rich Chileans, boiling waves hurled huge boulders from the seawall into the streets. Farther south near Valdivia, the naval ocean-going tug Janequeo was dashed against rocks and sank; 43 of 72 crewmen died...
...eradication with dredges and herbicides, the plants cluster to form islands strong enough to support animals. "You can never let up," says William E. Wunderlich, aquatic growth control chief of the New Orleans District of the Army's Corps of Engineers. "I've seen a 300-h.p. tug stopped tight by water hyacinth. I've seen grown men walking...