Word: woodenness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1920-1929
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...oldtime wooden covered bridge is a U. S. institution. New England in particular abounds with specimens. Narrow, dark, rickety, they stand indefinitely; they vex the speedy motorist, he is obliged to slow up and turn on his lights. The mechanistic 20th century has been unable to figure out exactly why these bridges have covers. Girls from Northampton have asked youths from New Haven and Cambridge: "Why?" and been told that it was to prevent horses from becoming frightened and jumping in the river...
...last week all illusions were shattered when President Coolidge informed the press that wooden bridges had covers merely to protect the lower timbers from the elements which would rot them. Such bridges will frequently outlast a succession of iron bridges. The President told of a wooden covered span near Springfield, Mass., which has been standing more than a century...
...their places as the Rhineland collided with the Japanese S. S. Mitsuki Maru. Then quiet again, and a trickling of yellow river water in among the beans. Like the droplets that crawl into men's beards to soften them for shaving; like the droplets that stole into the wooden wedges of Egyptian quarrymen exhuming stone for the Pyramids; like droplets that will steal into compressed Chinese waterflowers to make them bloom in bowls on Occidental library tables-so stole droplets of the yellow Yangtze flood in between the starch layers of the Rhineland's myriad passive beans, making...
Some few added that the arsenal at Dover was overstocked by anywhere from 800% to 300%, that the roofs of the storage warehouses were wooden, that no sprinkler systems were used inside the buildings, that the high explosives had been jammed together in buildings much too close together. Nothing definite was said concerning the contention of Professor Michael Pupin of Columbia University, who stated that the lightning could have been held under control by the use of copper roofings connected by heavy copper strappings directly to the ground; or the belief of Inventor Hudson Maxim that subsurface magazines are essential...
With naive enthusiasm he announced that Lincoln was not, as some said, unfriendly to Catholicism, but that "when Father St. Cyr came to say mass for Lincoln's stepmother, Mr. Lincoln would prepare the altar himself. Indeed with his own hands Abraham Lincoln carved out six wooden chairs to be used at the mass. And if I could only find those chairs, I'd pay for them with their weight in gold...