Word: wicker
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Gave Vice President John Garner a good excuse for conducting a front-porch Presidential campaign in 1940. Senate members of the Two Hours For Lunch Club presented him with a shiny new wicker rocking chair...
Other lawn games: deck tennis, lawn darts (with a cork target set on a wooden backstop), clock golf, rope quoits, paddle tennis, lawn cricket (a juvenile version of the British game), lawn hi-li (played on a court similar to badminton with wicker baskets instead of racquets and a narrow cord instead of a net), penguin skittles (a complicated version of ninepins with wooden penguins to knock down...
...rubber ball off the face of a wooden paddle. But those who have ever spent a night in Miami or Havana know that "high lie" is the way you pronounce the Cuban national game, spelled jai alai and played by scooping the ball in mid-air with shallow wicker baskets and hurling it against the walls of a long concrete court...
Originally called pelota (ball) and played with the bare hand against church walls in the Basque country three centuries ago, the game gradually evolved until three concrete walls were used instead of one, and a cesta (wicker basket shaped like a pelican's lower bill) was strapped onto the wrist to protect the hand from the sting of the fast-moving little pelota (hard as a golf ball and a little smaller than a baseball). Cubans imported the sport in 1900, called it jai alai for no other reason than that it was played at an arena in Havana...
Presently he replaced the instrument. A bell rang aboard the Q. E. D. Mother Fokker's call had been the launching signal. A wicker-jacketed bottle of Zuyder Zee water burst against the yacht's bow, workmen knocked away the keel blocks, loosed the hawsers, and the Q. E. D. started down the ways. But before more than a few feet of her hull had entered the water, she came to a dead stop. Her stern was stuck in gooey Harlem mud, there to list forlornly until the next high tide floated her up, long past midnight...