Word: acridity
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...flame that slashed toward the coast, cutting off the entire southern half of the island. The flames trapped busloads of tourists in the apple country and carloads of fleeing farmers; they swept into Hobart's suburbs, blowing up a dynamite factory, gutting a brewery, and raising a thick, acrid pall of smoke that shut down the Hobart airport. In fact, the fire wiped out three of the island's burgeoning industries: a brewery, a fish cannery and a carbide plant. Trees exploded in the heat. Gutted paddocks sent up a stench of incinerated livestock. Houses melted. Autos burst...
...Banana. To succeed Thompson as ambassador at large, Johnson named Ellsworth Bunker, 72, a courtly, tough-minded troubleshooter. It was Bunker's Yankee courage and persistence, above all, that brought peace and honest elections to the Dominican Republic in 1966 after its acrid civil war. As an envoy of the Organization of American States, the tall, white-haired New Englander-moved unconcerned past furious rebels and through gunfire to meet the warring politicos and cajole them into signing a ceasefire. Later he served as mediator during the cliff-hanging months before President Joaquín Balaguer's inauguration...
...desolation for another: the trenches of World War I. At 25, he witnessed the collapse of Italian culture under Mussolini. At 29, when he published his first volume of verse (Cuttlefish Bones), he was an apocalyptic pessimist who experienced "existence as entropy" and expressed the experience in language as acrid and compact as Dante...
...staging Under Milk Wood as a simple reading was one mistake, staging it as a farce was another. The play leaves an acrid taste behind unless the inhabitants of Llareggub, Thomas's imaginary Welsh backwater, retain their basic dignity. We follow them through a typical spring day -- eavesdropping as they dream, work, gossip, wish, torment one another, and frolic in the hay -- and almost everyone is bizarre and funny. But the purpose of the tour is to change our minds, to make us see the human beings behind the aberrations. If our feelings don't change and deepen, if automatic...
Build or Bus. The bill survived three months of acrid debate in the legislature, and is certain to create even more bitter controversy if lawmakers in other states try to use it as a model. It declares that any school is "racially imbalanced" if more than 50% of the enrollment is nonwhite (but not vice versa), and calls for an annual head count to check the balance. Where an imbalance exists, local school authorities must devise plans to correct it. If they fail to do so, the state not only can, but must cut off state aid to that district...