Word: driftful
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...again here I am more the universal undergraduate I than I would like to be--take refuge in a group. Harvard is unmanageable, and we all have to manage, so we drift or plunge into a group. Harvard the whole place becomes almost as much outside my perimeter as the world beyond it. Unlike some other groups in society, many of the ones at Harvard encourage imagination and creativity--some in fact depend on it for their existence as groups. But even then, it is a circumscribed kind of creativity and it leads to a circumscribed individuality...
...narrow sense, Lyndon Johnson could function superlatively under stress. He could rap out hard decisions, maneuver in delicate foreign squabbles, intervene effectively in complex labor disputes. But in the less tangible sphere of sustaining the nation's confidence, understanding the drift of opinion, coping with articulate critics, Johnson was all too vulnerable...
...time since his capture, Rowe had become an almost legendary figure in Viet Nam. The Special Forces refused to give up on him. Occasionally, intelligence reports would drift in indicating that he was not only alive but making life difficult for his jailers. There were recurring tales about a prisoner that the Viet Cong called "Mr. Trouble," apparently because he had made several attempts at escape and remained utterly defiant of his captors. Some in Saigon thought that Rowe was Mr. Trouble. In 1967, a Viet Cong defector who had seen Rowe in a prison camp grudgingly characterized...
...occasionally wonder if Vonnegut's writing will lose its appeal a few ages hence. Certainly life will continue to become even more complex and our minds will want to identify that this is happening to us. But will people drift out of the particular absurdities they now languish in and start speaking in a new idiom different from the one Vonnegut's characters used to speak? And would such an occurrence make the then readers unable to recognize the truth in the writing and hence not laugh? Well, fundamentally I believe that it is the cliches that will never change...
...bullet was wandering about in his ventricles, the fluid-containing cavities deep inside the brain. When Barrios lay flat on his back, the fragment stayed in an upper ventricle. When he stood up, it went into a smaller, lower ventricle. When he lay down again, it tended to drift back up. The great danger was that it would get stuck in the narrow passage between the ventricles, thereby cutting off the fluid that drains into the spinal canal, and causing fatal pressure within Barrios' skull...