Word: excess
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...vintage Harvard, where frugality and caution are routinely carried to excess. The University's refusal to install the more efficient and time-saving copy card system in its major libraries is, after all, typical of an institution which has a $3 billion endowment and charges over $10,000 in tuition, yet nonetheless claims that it cannot afford to keep Widener open on Sunday and has spent years deciding whether carpetting Lamont Library would break its piggy bank...
...long known that during the early part of the Tertiary period, which began about 65 million years ago, the entire planet was warmer, probably due to carbon dioxide that spewed into the atmosphere during movements of the earth's crust. The result was a greenhouse effect, in which the excess carbon dioxide, like the windows of a greenhouse, trapped the heat of sunlight...
...workmates and schoolmates, to their neighbors and friends, to their communities and to themselves -- that drug use is not acceptable. If that is, in fact, one result of the current frenzy over what has been a recurring crisis for successive generations of Americans, then even all the hype and excess may in retrospect be worthwhile...
...people die every year, but that doesn't tell you about the disease and disability of people who don't happen to die that year," he said. "The cost in human resources is incalculable, and the cost in money is in excess of $60 billion a year...
...Such excess, suggests Serpell, leads to the still prevalent view that demonstrative affection for animals is peculiar, if not unnatural. In 16th century Europe, women who talked to animals ran the risk of being incinerated for witchcraft. Today the ardent pet enthusiast is suspected of being a closet misanthrope. Not necessarily. The author's reading of available data tends to a more positive interpretation: "a vague suggestion that some pet-owners, for reasons which are unclear, may have a greater desire for company and friendship and because of this use their pets to augment what they already derive from...