Word: causticity
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...song on his lips. He can be pithy or philosophic, can speak from the heart while poking the funny bone, and speak tenderly of babies and bad women and sad men, and speak up for dreams, and speak out against war, and be often crackerbarrel and occasionally caustic. America has always fancied down-to-earth figures who look up at the stars and whose voices can both ring out and drawl, and in the 82-year-old Sandburg it has a notable specimen...
...expense-account society-aside from the benefits reaped by free-spenders of the company's money-is that the uninhibited use of high-priced food, liquor and gifts helps mightily in making a sale. Not so, says Clarence B. Randall, retired board chairman of Inland Steel, in a caustic attack on "The Myth of the Magic Expense Account" in the current Dun's Review. After 30 years in the executive suites of the nation's eighth largest steelmaker, Randall, 69, believes that "this orgiastic abuse of the expense account is a spectacular and alarming trend, participated...
...Dust. Oxygen alone is not enough. As the crew breathes, it contaminates the air with exhaled carbon dioxide. In older subs the way to get rid of it was to absorb most of it in a caustic such as lithium hydroxide. The nuclear subs must have a far more elaborate system: secondhand air is passed through a liquid containing monoethanolamine, which absorbs carbon dioxide at room temperature, is then heated, and releases the gas so that it can be piped...
Even better equipment is in the labs. The Navy is working on a magical electrolytic cell containing a sodium sulphate solution. When an electric current passes through it, oxygen bubbles off from one electrode. An acid is formed in the solution at the same electrode, and a caustic accumulates at the other electrode. The caustic can be withdrawn and used to absorb carbon dioxide from the sub's atmosphere. When it is then remixed with the acid from the other electrode, the carbon dioxide separates and can be pumped out of the submarine. What remains is the same sodium...
...Wayward Comrade and the Commissars, by Yurii Olesha. The author later found it advisable to become a docile party-liner, but in the 1920s, when he wrote the short fiction pieces in this paperback collection, he was one of Communism's most caustic satirists...