Word: direful
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...symphonies definitely launched on a new season, saw conductors back from Europe with new music and sharpened batons, saw stormy rehearsals and brilliant first nights. Many bridges had been crossed since last spring. Orchestras had been left leaderless, some penniless. Deficits had been threateningly announced; in a few dire cases, cleared. New leaders had been imported, borrowed. The situation...
Then, assuming his psychic powers-an alleged natural gift in which he takes great pride-he predicted dire war: "I am even certain that many of those powers talking about disarmament do so in order to inspire greater confidence, thus disguising their purposes. According to my opinion, we shall go through another and more awful war at the latest in 1937, a war which will last only a few days and possibly only a few hours...
...interests, has ceased to count: filing systems, ever more elaborate, even to the point of completely baffling the office force; questionnaires, ever more personal, so much so that the applicant for work must write home before he can proceed intelligently; ever increasing routine, requiring reports and whatnot, under dire threat of being blacklisted at the Bureau. The tyranny of so-called efficiency has reached new heights this fall with the requirement that applicants file pictures of themselves and a budget for their year's income and proposed expenses with the Secretary for Employment...
...psychology engendered by a peacetime career in diplomacy is often fatal to diplomatic emergencies. Career men, capable of a career, can be and now are being used in our diplomacy, but care must be taken lest the development of a right of seniority in promotion . . . does not have its dire result on the future of American diplomacy...
Commander Nicholas H. Heck, earthquake expert of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, assembled seismograph records, studied them, decided that the dire disturbance had been in western China or in Tibet, where population is thin, communication slow. He waited to hear if mountains had toppled, lonely caravans been swallowed...