Word: chronic
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Librettist Colby's campy, hit-or-miss humor works best in a scene describing the heroine's mother, a "chronic shiverer" who goes to her reward wearing enough garments to stock a branch of Marks & Spencer. Other beguiling wackinesses: a song about a man who makes eating vegetables seem a sexual experience, the vocal travails of a hiccuping, stuttering woman who has "bubbles in her bonnet," and the soprano heroine's sudden loss of her "high note," which she regains at the price of addiction-to helium sucked from balloons. In less good taste is a character...
...world's highest, compared with .7% in the U.S. Only 15% of the country's land is arable, and, to make matters worse, the government's agriculture program has badly faltered. As a result, Kenya, once self-sufficient in food production, has become a chronic importer of expensive grains, including the daily staple, corn. Prices for the country's traditional exports (coffee, tea, livestock products) have drastically fallen. Kenya is expected to run a balance of payments deficit of as much as $1 billion this year. Per capita income, only about $400 annually, is declining...
...soon as the film industry invented movie stars, the public caught a case of chronic curiosity about their off-screen lives. Americans idolized the images of actors but still never stopped asking: What are they really like? For years, Hollywood exploited the public curiosity while making no honest effort to answer that basic question; it was left to fan magazines to contrive tales that supposedly revealed what the top players were in private life. But no more. Lately, the outpouring of tell-all and tell-a-lot books by and about filmdom's ranking personalities has grown into...
...mismatch worthy of one of his own plots. "What very strange marriages literary men seem to make," Fanny, the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, remarked after meeting Emma. She might have said the same thing after meeting Florence Dugdale, Hardy's second wife, who suffered from chronic depression. Typing up poetry that addressed Emma as "woman much missed" did little to cheer up the second...
...paper about swingers, swapping, singles bars. 'Well, maybe we should try some of that stuff,' he would say, with a laugh intended to prove nonseriousness." She traces the next stages, including a period of "a lot of half-explained or occasionally overexplained latenesses, and a seemingly chronic at-home fatigue." Moving on to his inevitable departure, the abandoned wife wonders how she could have been surprised...