Word: whining
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Except for the shrill whine of their wings, most varieties make no sound audible to man. But the Cornell researchers caged four of the peskiest species-Anopheles quadrimaculatus (malaria), Aedes aegypti (yellow fever), Aedes albopictus (dengue) and Culex pipiens (New Jersey) -and confronted them with a microphone and high-powered amplifier. A surprising variety of noises, resembling bird calls, emerged. Mosquitoes, it turned out, have voices in the middle ranges of human hearing (frequencies of 250 to 1,500 cycles per second). Females bellow; male voices are thin and high-pitched...
...cross the Rhine through the artificial white fog, listening to the whine of woodsaws and the coughing of the red-eyed engineers who have been living in this chemical cloud for days as they throw bridge after bridge across the smooth, fast-flowing waters. On the other side, as the mist lifts, you pass through the familiar phenomena of big captured towns in Germany: mile after mile of smashed industrial sections, of ruined homes, of buildings broken, and broken over & over again into brick dust. Then suddenly you are past the last stretch of rusted junk that used...
Scottish veterans of far-off El Alamein heard it in the whine of shells, and they skirled bagpipes and sang Annie Laurie as they crossed the Rhine. Canadians who remembered their dead at Dieppe could scent victory in the smoke. U.S. doughboys, who had learned bitterly before the Roer and in the Ardennes that pessimism could also be a virtue, spilled out of the Navy's inland fleet (see below) with more than usual speed. There was confident enthusiasm now in the workmanlike way they went about their jobs...
...focal character of most Thurber-prose and drawings is a reticent, befuddled, thwarted little man who tries sadly to preserve himself and his reason against a practically worldwide onslaught. Grim psychiatrists, gadgets that "whir and whine and whiz," erratic servants, domineering women, unfriendly dogs, ghosts, foreigners -all are in league to crush the Thurber Male. This harried biped, like Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Mann's Hans Castorp, represents 20th-century Man. To Thurber's devotees, who rate him the greatest U.S. humorist since Mark Twain, his blankly exaggerated reports of their own qualms and misadventures...
Three weeks ago startled network officials heard frustrated Bill Goodwin sing out his sign-off ("This is CBS ... the Columbia . . . Broadcasting . . . System") in a rapidly rising whine that broke into a high, hysterical giggle. Fortnight ago he concluded it with a stricken "OUCH!" Last week, he added a single, unsavory "Ughh...