Word: breakdown
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Southern schools have been showing greater interest in Radcliffe and many more application forms were sent out to Southern students this year, according to the Admissions Director. The specific regional breakdown, has not been compiled, but Mrs. Stimpson believes that a larger number of actual applications were received from the South than in previous years...
...feet. And one of the wives is a great big daddy-sized redhead named Jill St. John-a very matey lady with lots of black paint over her eyes. All she does is dance, dance, dance. Wicked Jill and the other wives cause Dean to have a nervous breakdown. Not that any of them have been sleeping in his bed; it's just that he is engaged to marry Elizabeth Montgomery and worries that she too might turn out to be a Daddy Bear baiter...
...enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase and studied it in the test tube. Normally, this enzyme breaks down alcohol in the body to acetaldehyde, which another enzyme in turn breaks down to acetic acid. In their experiments at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, the researchers learned that barbiturates hinder the first breakdown process and leave a lot of alcohol in the system. And alcohol has a severe depressing effect on some primitive nerves, including the vital center that regulates breathing. While different barbiturates showed varying degrees of interference, all upset the normal metabolic process to some extent...
Throughout the book, in alternating sections, Carruth's narrator presents himself to the reader in a strange double exposure-as he appeared in the early 1950s, when he had his first breakdown, and as he appears now, writing while caring for a deaf-mute as atonement for past sins. In the earlier period the narrator is (as Carruth was) a poet, editor, and a nihilist who thinks that "1 must be really half dead" but is not particularly disturbed by the fact: most of contemporary America, he implies, is in pretty much the same shape. The agent...
...tries to explain his trial of faith to family and friends, they go into "hiding somewhere behind tight, patient smiles." Sobbing with vexation, he shouts, "Matty, Dave, I want to have this thing out right now! This whole goddamn thing!" But they are not listening. Finally he suffers a breakdown and flees Bloodbury and family. When the doctor comes to see him, he is leafing through the Reader's Digest, idly looking for clues to his failure...