Word: dismalness
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Unless medical science provides a quick fix, that is. So far, the record on diet pills has been pretty dismal. Amphetamines, which speeded metabolism and suppressed appetite, looked promising in the 1950s and '60s but turned out to be physically harmful and powerfully addictive. Drugs like fen-phen and Redux, which alter the brain's chemistry, had scary side effects. Newer drugs like orlistat and food substitutes like olestra keep fat from entering the body, but they cause serious bowel discomfort...
Malthus was right. So read a car bumper sticker on a busy New Jersey highway the other day, and it got me thinking about the Rev. Thomas Malthus, the English political economist who gave the "dismal science" its nickname. His "Essay on the Principle of Population," published in 1798, predicted a gloomy future for humanity: our population would grow until it reached the limits of our food supply, ensuring that poverty and famine would persistently rear their ugly faces to the world...
...rigid schedule more appealing by offering an attractive trade-off. For companies such as Corning and Goodyear, his consulting firm has created schedules that include 10 to 20 weeks of time off each year or that offer a seven- or eight-day break a month. Another way to make dismal shifts more appealing is to pay better. Coleman has found that many nightworkers will accept a difficult schedule if they can also work predictable overtime hours. "They could have a schedule," says Coleman, "with built-in overtime that rewards them with 30% more pay than a traditional worker while giving...
With a 1-0 victory over the Huskies (12-6), the No. 17 Crimson (12-1-1, 5-0 Ivy) took revenge on UConn for the past two years of dismal defeats, including a devastating 5-0 shutout two years...
...much of it brought on by the Vice President himself. He ignored his only Democratic rival until Bill Bradley's minivan pulled up right alongside Air Force Two. He turned his campaign into a jobs program for consultants and seemed congenitally unable to connect with voters. Things were so dismal for so long, in fact, that after Gore fired his pollster, slashed his staff, declared himself the underdog and moved his headquarters to Nashville, Tenn., it was probably inevitable that his luck would change, at least for a little while...