Word: abrupt
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...Heckendorn, there is no relief just yet. Her abrupt firing after 12 years at the company has left her devastated, she says. Returning to work after filing her complaint, Heckendorn found that her key no longer opened her office door. "The senior vice president of human resources came up and unlocked it for me," she recalls. "Then he gave me a box and stood there while I packed up my things. When he asked if there was anything else of mine that belonged to the company, I said, 'Yes, my heart and soul...
...vacation came to an abrupt end when Kelly became feverish and began hallucinating. Despite intensive care at three different hospitals and the best efforts of doctors to figure out what was wrong, she kept getting worse. She had muscle spasms, salivated uncontrollably and suffered bouts of terror. She recoiled from her mother and father and even her own hair. During one lucid moment the little girl told her parents, "I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't be afraid of you, but I can't help it." On July 11, three days before her 12th birthday, she died with doctors...
...walking tempo that gathered speed and supported a whimsical clarinet solo inevitably finished in an abrupt minor cadence to start the fourth movement. (This is Bartok, after all.) Throughout the third and fourth movements, Mehta conducted from soloist to soloist in the winds and brass. He often adjusted the meter of his baton strokes to fit the parts that became a continuous string--a real concerto for an orchestra...
...breakdown of social order comparable to modern Somalia." In that year the king and warriors of nearby Tamarindito and Arroyo de Piedra besieged Dos Pilas. Says Demarest: "They defeated the king of Dos Pilas and probably dragged him back to Tamarindito to sacrifice him." The reason for the abrupt change in the Maya's battleground behavior, he suspects, was that the ruling elite had grown large enough to produce intense rivalries among its members. Their ferocious competition, which exploded into civil war, may have been what finally triggered the society's breakdown. Similar breakdowns, he believes, happened in other areas...
Arlen and Diane Chase, archaeologists at the University of Central Florida, believe their work at Caracol, in present-day Belize, also shows that escalating warfare was largely responsible for that ancient city's abrupt extinction. Among the evidence they cite: burn marks on buildings, the uncharacteristically unburied body of a six-year-old child lying on the floor of a pyramid, and an increase in war imagery on late monuments and pottery. "Of course we found weapons too," says Arlen...