Word: matchwood
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...Monday the hillside under Mameyes suddenly buckled. The slide started near the top of the slope and gathered force in an avalanche of devastation. A shear of heavy clay and loosened limestone outcroppings tore through the flimsy homes, crushing many like so much matchwood and trapping their occupants. "I cannot explain how we are alive," recounted Julio Maldonado, who with his wife and six children escaped the swath of the slide. "First the entrance wall fell off, and then the other walls fell off. And then we were sliding down, sandwiched between the floor and the ceiling...
Burgess might have risked one more quote from Hopkins. Man, one poem said, "This Jack, joke, poor potsherd/ Patch, matchwood, immortal diamond/ Is immortal diamond." Otherwise, what's so wrong with sun-kissed clockwork oranges? ∙Timothy Foote
...waste heap to look into reports that the gigantic mass was moving. With a shock, Evans discovered that it was. "Suddenly I saw the heap shifting," he recalled later. "The movement was like thunder. I could hear trees on each side being crushed to matchwood...
...Twitter. Z-o-o-om. MA-A-A-CHINE!" The sounds whooped and wallowed in the semidarkness, seemed to race one another, swooped head on into ear-splitting collisions. Under the domed ceiling, lights wriggled and flickered, reeled and burst in dazzling, flaky showers. A voice came booming in: "MATCHWOOD SPLITS INTO MATCHES...
...unintelligible recitations of the final pages of Ulysses. Also included were such numbers as the airy Suite in the Form of a Mushroom; Untitled, an explosive collection of train noises; and Dialogue for Man and Machine, which, in addition to the whoo-whoo effect and the obscure philosophizing about matchwood, contains this mysterious admonition...