"Policy groups" have been formed that throw down a challenge to Mr Aso; they might serve as springboards to form a new political party.
Past events and conversations serve as springboards from which he leaps off into long passages of wordy rumination.
An entrenched regional bias in voting was evident once again in the 17 races which were most closely watched: posts for nine provincial governors and the mayors of eight major cities, which are often springboards to the presidency.
Composed of everyday materials – paper, pencils, paper-clips, vegetables – they are often springboards to bigger works elsewhere, but they "add a rigour for the practice and give me focus".
Having uninterrupted time together has given scope for wide-ranging conversations that have served as springboards for learning.
And Dan Chiasson springboards from James 1 23 ("For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass") into a poem about how he interviewed (or didn't interview) Janet Malcolm, whose new book "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" originated as an article in the magazine: She'd interviewed herself, I realized later; I was bystander to a rendezvous.
Many of the article's sub-headings answered its own question: "Should men be springboards?"; "Ambition is not a crime!"; "The miracle woman standing on the shoulder of giants".
Ionesco once said that plays were not literature; he meant his to be, in a sense, springboards for the actors' imaginations.
Does "Selma" "unfairly" depict L.B.J.? Whether it's critics seeking springboards for Op-ed-like ruminations or political writers driving an agenda, these writers are not offering subtle viewings to discern ideological patterns surreptitiously woven into a film's fabric but playing kindergarten teacher to naïve and tender-minded viewers in ostensible need of doctrinal protection.
Once written, his scripts became springboards for actors' astonishingly free transformations of them.
For many a group on the jam-band scene, songs are outside preoccupations, useful mainly as springboards, and hardly the yardstick by which the enterprise should be judged.
