Word: whirred
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With this new whir of activity, the vast emptiness of the Yukon and Northwest Territories is changing fast. Eskimos whose fathers hunted seals and lived in igloos now drive bulldozers and travel by outboard-powered glass-fiber canoe. One Eskimo, who needed a new hair sight for his rifle, calmly dismantled his $100 wristwatch for a piece of the mainspring. In Inuvik, Indian youths with ducktail haircuts and jeans crouch over a pool table, while their girl friends in ribboned pony tails and candy-striped toreador pants play A Teenager in Love on the jukebox...
...high-quality tequila (from the modernized distilleries in the town of Tequila, 35 miles away) and Sangrita, a tequila chaser made of a secret formula of tomato juice, lime juice, orange juice, sugar, salt, pepper, chilies and spices. The couples watch carefully as automatic cash registers whir up the week's purchases in toothpaste, carrots and dehydrated pimento soup - and then they stop by the Laundromat to pick up the washing...
...periscope sliced through the surface, and the playing reflections of stars rippled in retreat like scattering minnows. Fifty-eight feet below, in the control room of the submarine, men stood their watches in the eerie green glow of instrument lights. The prison silence was broken only by the whir of a generator, the purr of a hydraulic pump, the leaky-faucet sound of water trickling down the packing gland of the periscope barrel. The sub broke water, the bridge hatch swung open, the skipper and his lookouts scrambled topside. There they began the countdown required before launching...
Tenements, still the city's drab cincture to its towers, menaced a thousand rubbish-strewn, treeless streets. Subway passengers broiled; Broadway theaters and side-street restaurants hung "Delightfully Air Conditioned" banners or closed for the season. The greenery-edged hem of the metropolis echoed to domestic sounds -the whir of lawnmowers, the jingling ice-cream-truck bells, the clink of beer glasses, shrieks of splashing children in backyard wading pools...
...with 500,000 clothespins, 129,000 tiles, 5000 reeds and 200 plastic guitars. The editors' character revelations, which are bound up with statistics, are usually more fascinating than the inventories. Though the Maccaferris like strumming a ukulele "the music that gives him and his wife most pleasure is the whir of the adding machines"--which last year rang up gross sales of $3 million, on which the Maccaferris netted a "melodious" two hundred thousand after taxes. Throughout the book taxes play the role of a mild villain...