Word: breakdown
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...leash. The "X-er"-the man whose job it is to paint big Xs on the windows of condemned buildings-feels himself the personification of doom, gets so worked up over X-ing out so many Fifth Avenue mansions and pleasant brownstones that he has a nervous breakdown. The most helpless, indomitable. charming ragamuffin of the lot is Leroy, a young Negro boy who plays tunes on glass bowls, sells Bibles, and talks...
...another more variable, less understood, and-until recently-more neglected problem: language disability. The technical name, aphasia, covers far more than its literal meaning, "loss of speech." Usually, neither innate intelligence nor accumulated knowledge is destroyed, but access to each is cut off from the patient by a breakdown in his communications system. This breakdown may damage the receptive (reading and listening) functions, or the expressive (speaking, gesturing, writing), or both, in infinitely various combinations...
...only in the most general terms. Even when figures were given, they were carefully selected to tell little. Titov revealed, for instance, that his ship was launched by a multistage booster having six liquid-propellant rocket engines with 600,000 kilograms (1,323,000 Ibs.) of total thrust. Without breakdown into stages, this information told U.S. scientists little that they had not already calculated for themselves. The same was true of Titov's revelation that, against instructions, he left the Vostok II's portholes uncovered during re-entry and saw flame and molten material from the heat shield...
...Complete breakdown calls for the familiar artificial kidney.* Partial failure calls for repeated "peritoneal irrigations" to wash out the body's natural metabolic poisons-and the process requires an abdominal incision for each irrigation...
With most steel users carrying fairly heavy inventories that they had built up as a hedge against a possible breakdown in the recent labor negotiations, the demand for steel since the contract settlement has softened. In April's first week, production fell from 82.5% of capacity to 81%. And for months the steel companies have found it hard to maintain their old prices on such items as wire products, tubes and stainless steel sheets. Muttered an Inland Steel executive: "This is no kind of market in which to raise prices. We have been selling most steel products below list...