Word: discardable
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...everywhere the nomadic Richardson moves, the morale around him seems to rise. The men with whom he works most closely consider him not only warm but witty. His mind is widely regarded as brilliant, with a bureaucrat's invaluable-and rare-capacity both to retain intricate detail and discard unproductive trivia, keeping basic goals in focus. His aim at HEW, he explained, was "to get away from the hypnotic absorption in tending the machinery and to look outward at what is happening to people." Richardson not only contends that HEW, which has 280 programs and a budget larger than...
...first Helmreich and Prescott attributed the phenomenon to the intellectual stimulation mothers provide in trying to cope with the restlessness of bedridden youngsters. The researchers had to discard the theory when they also found the Teddy Roosevelt effect in Navy enlisted men who came, not from middle-and upper-middle-class homes like those of the aquanauts, but from lower-middle-class backgrounds that did not encourage study or reading. An alternative explanation, suggests Helmreich, may be that "children who are sick more often are more isolated from others of their own age and so they tend to use adults...
...sensible step would be simply to cut the Olympics down to governable size. A move is already under way to discard repetitive events in certain sports, notably swimming, where four basic strokes are parlayed into innumerable races. Also, it is not necessary for a nation to field three athletes in every event, as the major powers invariably do; surely, two would be sufficient. Perhaps only the world's 15 best, based on established records, should compete; team sports, such as basketball and soccer, which exacerbate national combativeness, might well be dropped; this alone would represent a giant step back...
Scenarist Serling's adaptation of Irving Wallace's novel is full of cheap chatter and the kind of bombast ("We cannot murder tyranny by murdering the tyrant") that even a Washington speechwriter might discard as overly florid. As portrayed by Jones, the hero is certainly fulsome enough to be a major political figure. Joseph Sargent's direction is energetic, consisting in large measure of dogging his actors with a mobile camera as they bolt through endless doorways along the corridors of power. -Jay Cocks
...Belgian Congo, has been preoccupied with a search for national "authenticity." He has changed dozens of place names reminiscent of colonial times, and the country itself is now known as the Republic of Zaïre. Mobutu has also decreed that all Zaïrians-beginning with himself-should discard their Christian names in favor of "authentic" African ones. As a final symbol of the new order, Mobutu changed the principal national holiday from June 30-its independence day-to November 24, the anniversary of his own coup...