Word: downwardly
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...effect, the layered look has simply extended downward. Legs are being gussied up-particularly to the advantage of the unbeautiful ones-with thigh-high socks and knee-high socks, cuffers (a.k.a. anklets) and the leg warmers that dancers have worn for years. One or two or all of these furbelows may be worn at the same time, and they can be used to make endless variations on a theme: a knee-high can be rolled down to become a cuffer; the leg warmer can be adjusted to look like Chaplin's baggy pants. (Beautiful Legs have learned they...
Fourteen years ago, scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Tests, those college entrance exams taken with dread each year by a million high school students, began to drift downward-after holding steady for decades. The mean score for verbal ability, measured on the SAT'S 200 to 800 scale, dropped gradually from 478 in the 1962-63 academic year into the 430s. The median mathematics score slipped from 502 into the 470s. In 1975, when the combined score plunged eleven points in just one year, alarmed parents and educators demanded to know why. The widespread concern prompted the College Entrance...
...really the occasion for an extemporaneous review of Edel's own discoveries. "Any academic can set up his shingle and be a literary critic," says Edel to his T-shirted students. "But biography is more difficult; it involves vast archives." On the other hand, he dismisses-with a downward sweep of his arms-documentary biographers who limit themselves to a recitation of facts. Says he: "The only imagination allowed is over form, not facts, but that imagination can be considerable." Edel's ideal, and a theme of the course, is that biography "can become a work...
...back like a mating insect. Accompanied by five silver T-38 chase planes that drifted around the pair like pilot fish escorting a shark, the odd couple climbed slowly to 8,100 meters (27,000 ft.). At that altitude the 747 flew over an imaginary hump, then nosed downward to pick up speed. At 7,230 meters (24,000 ft.), Haise fired the three explosive bolts holding the two ships together. To the relief of some engineers who feared the Enterprise might not be able to clear the 747's tall tail, the two craft separated cleanly...
William eventually marries a brigadier general's daughter-and the trajectory of his life veers sharply downward. For no reason that he has been trained to calculate, the marriage sours. He resigns from the military, hoping to please his wife, and only succeeds in driving her back to an ex-lover. He must ponder mysteries too large to be circumscribed by a gun sight: "They had started off on the wrong foot, not only when they had first met, but from the day they were born in their separate corners of the universe...