I know about one of those Air Force "mills" (but that's an Army term)
that was not defenstrated. It's punishment was much more severe. It
was treated to a few rounds from a 45 caliber automatic. :-)
Chuck Norcutt
On 9/24/2010 7:36 AM, Bob Whitmire wrote:
> When I was in training to be a radio intercept operator back in the
> late '60s, the Army taught us how to copy code by sending dits and
> dahs through headphones to groups of 30 or so trainees. We then would
> shout, for example, "Dit-Dah! Alpha!" and allow the pinkies of our
> left hands to depress the A key. The typewriters were called "mills,"
> and typed in all caps. Learning the code was apparently not
> everyone's cuppa, and during my training cycle, several trainees
> defenestrated their mills, much to the consternation of the
> instructors. If you washed out of code school, your enlistment was
> truncated to three years from four, but your new assignment was
> usually Infantry Training School.
>
> FWIW, I defenestrated nothing or no one, and learned the code so well
> that I still can recite it nearly flawlessly. Copy it, too, if the
> operator isn't too ham fisted.
>
> --Bob Whitmire www.bobwhitmire.com
>
>
>
> On Sep 24, 2010, at 6:49 AM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
>
>> I prefer to keep it active, as in, "Who defenestrated that slave."
>> I did manage to sneak it into an incident report at school when I
>> specified that student A, for his own amusement, defenestrated
>> student B. The co-ordinator complained that he'd rather not have to
>> use a dictionary when reading reports. I replied that as a teacher
>> of English Literature, he should be familiar with the verb. Up
>> north where I was born, there was no time for Latinate niceties.
>> The stock suggestion at the commencement of a serious
>> disagreement was - "Choose thi' winder." Andrew Fildes
>> afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
--
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