Word: impedimenta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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During the working day it helps to pray: "Lord, fill me with enthusiasm for my product (naming it)." With nightfall comes the time to "flush negatives," to practice "mind-drainage," or (after the fashion of Author Peale himself) to "visualize 'dropping' mental impedimenta into an imaginary wastebasket...
...consummately prepared. "Major William Martin" got not only a foolproof identity card. He carried a picture of "Pam," the girl he was "engaged" to, her last touching love letters, stubs of theater tickets, a dunning letter from a bank, a letter from his "father" and the usual pocket impedimenta. His identity-card photograph was that of a man who looked like him. The letters he was os tensibly to have carried to North Africa in a plane that crashed were actually signed by high officials, two of them by Lord Louis Mountbatten. To keep the body from deteriorating...
...Steamboat has other tried & tested ingredients. It covers a good long stretch of time (1869-1930) following the fortunes of the Batchelor family on a plantation in Louisiana. Author Keyes knows her Louisiana, proves it with a foreword on sources, a bibliography of steamboating, and all her usual period impedimenta: details of dress, descriptions of houses and plantations. And there is enough clatter about wills, heirs and taxes to bemuse an expert on the Napoleonic Code...
Suitably adapted to one's way of life, the rear compartment can be used for hauling around books and other impedimenta, or with the addition of camp chairs, a folding bed, and a bar, a hearse can carry the super-station wagon motif into the rolling country club stage...
...Traffic on the Pulaski Skyway-New Jersey's elevated high speed automobile thruway to Manhattan-was jammed into a honking, mile-long tangle by a mule named Devil's Brother. When the cops arrived, they found pans, bundles and other impedimenta from the mule's pack scattered over the highway, and the beast itself engaged in a tug of war with Owner Clarence Hornbeck, a cadaverous, 58-year-old man in a tall silk hat. Hornbeck's explanation: he had bet some friends in Galesburg, Ill. that he could walk the mule to New York...