Word: gangplank
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Farther down the river, at Wanxian, a young woman stevedore, of the same age as the oscilloscope workers, bends and stoops; all her muscles quiver as she heaves and finally lifts two huge buckets of pig livers for the third-class passengers. She staggers, makes it, totters up the gangplank. She is followed by other young women, beasts of burden, staggering under the bales, the cartons, the loadings of the vessel. I am pleased to watch them revolt, screaming, shaking fists at the forewoman who commands them. But next morning I am passing through the stark wonder of the gorges...
...ferryboat St. Edmund. The diesel-powered vessel discharged its human cargo, the last of some 11,000 prisoners taken by Britain in the Falkland Islands war, on a windswept dock in out-of-the-way Puerto Madryn, 650 miles south of Buenos Aires. One of the first down the gangplank was General Mario Benjamin Menendez, army commander in the Falklands, who saddened many of his countrymen when he surrendered to Britain's Major General John Jeremy Moore. Military authorities refused to allow the returning soldiers to be interviewed or photographed, but Menendez did offer a few words...
...species stems from the Ehrlichs' first and constantly invoked example, which, sad to say, is laughable. "Imagine that, just before you are about to board a jet plane, you see a man busily prying rivets out of its wings. As you rush in a panic back down the gangplank, he calls out, "Don't worry, I've taken a lot of rivets out already and the wing hasn't fallen off yet!" This scenario is supposed to be analagous to losing a few more species: One more might not matter, but, on the other hand, it might lead to disaster...
Seven years and innumerable appeals later, Edwards' pertinacity finally paid off. Last week, as the Soviet freighter Stanislavskiy rested in its Toronto berth, Sheriff Joseph Bremner trotted up the gangplank and informed Captain Yuri Surnin that he was seizing his ship until the bill was paid. Pravda, the Soviet Communist Party newspaper, yowled that the boarding had been carried out by "police thugs acting like medieval pirates." But when Edwards also took actions to freeze the bank accounts of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Moscow warmed to the possibility of a settlement of the original bill plus interest, court...
Those who wish to pull up the gangplank should probably remember that arguments eerily similar to their own have been offered almost since the beginning of the nation. In 1797 a Congressman declared that while liberal immigration policies were fine for a country new and unsettled, the U.S. was now mature and fully populated and so the gates must close to newcomers. In the depression of 1873, workers rioted in some cities over the immigrants who were stealing their jobs from them. Americans, so idealistically generous and expansive in their official mythology, have generally greeted foreigners with fear and loathing...