Word: whump
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Vancouver's Dr. Gary Romalis sees no difference after what happened to him last November. "I was just sitting in the kitchen, and I felt a kind of whump underneath," he recalls. "The first shot hit me and knocked me slowly off my chair. I felt that my left thigh was warm and wet. But I had no pain. Then there was another shot, and I realized I had been shot. I looked down, and I had a huge hole in my thigh that I could put my fist in. I was bleeding very, very heavily. I thought this...
...quickly unmasked as an illusion. And last week, somewhere outside the city, somebody aimed a mortar at the center of the crowded market, dropped a 120-mm round into the tube and fired. The shell slammed into a table crowded with shoppers and exploded with a concussive whump that echoed off the buildings surrounding the square. The force of the explosion twisted tables, shattered glass and ripped the canvas used to cover stalls...
Serb artillery shoots from the slopes on one side of the city, and Muslim shoots from the other. Sometimes they throw shells at each other. Sometimes they drop them into town. The big shells arrive with a crisp, concussive WHUMP! But sniper fire you hear only at the shooting end -- an irregular background noise of flat, hard pops. You look up wildly at the hills and imagine the snipers squinting through cross hairs. You wonder what they may be able to see through the mist. You pause to decode the physics: the sound you hear has been taking its time...