Word: pinching
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...young man lay drowsing on the operating table, numbed by morphine and a local anesthetic. Dimly, without pain, he felt the surgeon's electric drill cut through the bony tissue of his deafened ear. Then "a little pinch," and suddenly a great roar, like the waves of the sea. It was the muttered conversation of doctor and nurses, the first sounds the young man had heard in 16 years. For two weeks he lay in the hospital, gradually accustoming himself to the thunder of swinging doors, the drums and tramplings of tiptoeing nurses...
Certainly the week's activities had all the fog and confusion of a great military defeat. Important missions wound up in blind alleys or off in an entirely different direction. Important people were reported in one place, turned up in another. Amateur diplomats pinch-hit for professionals. Forgotten veterans found themselves dragged from retirement to undertake the gravest responsibilities. For almost a week almost nobody knew what in the world was going...
Scarcely more than a year ago Superman was just a comic-strip nobody from an obscure planet called Krypton. Now, as almost every kid in the U. S. (and many a grownup) well knows, Superman is THE man to have around in a 1940 pinch. He can outswim a torpedo, outfly an airplane, outdistance a streamliner train, outrun a speeding automobile, punch his way through armor plate. Also he can get down to brass tacks as Clark Kent, reporter, write superscoops for his paper...
...back his old job on the Board of Education; in 1935 he spent a few months as War Secretary (a job he did not like); later that year he became Lord Privy Seal. That being a job of few duties, Lord Halifax began, from time to time, to pinch-hit for Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden when Mr. Eden was away on diplomatic trips. Soon he was to do more than pinch-hit. On the same day that Adolf Hitler mocked Mr. Eden in a Reichstag speech, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decided to change Foreign Secretaries...
...that furrow a Harvard executive's brow-tenure, housing, food, to mention only a few-could be solved speedily by a single, simple means: more money. Funds are lacking here, funds are lacking there, until it is fairly evident that the rich man among America's universities knows that pinch of scarcity far better than many suspect. The fact is that with its enormous endowment of $146,000,000, Harvard is financially pressed. It grows poorer at a rate that justifies that gravest fears for its future. It is threatened with eventual starvation in a full-stocked pantry...