Word: exerts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nowadays most people are so slovenly in their use of language that he who talks not just in parsable sentences but in well-constructed paragraphs can exert a magical force on his auditors, who generally realize too late (as Simon's do) that he is using words not to reveal but to conceal. He also uses them as he does his phonograph - to drown out the sounds of pain, to keep everyone at a distance from his precious, empty self. It is a perversion of language's basic function, almost a parody of it, and a clear...
...years ago I spoiled an otherwise spotless fifth grade career by failing to produce for Miss Capponetti of Rosemont Elementary School a three-page handwritten report on colonial American shipbuilding, a topic which continues to exert an uncanny soporific effect...
...from the very earliest essays she wrote at the Lycee for her intellectual mentor, the philosopher Alain, Weil had stressed the conviction that to make her life worthwhile--to not "waste death," as she once put it--she would have to exert her Will against the seemingly infinite limitations that life presented (her own frail body, her recurring headaches, the constraints on social and political change in her lifetime). This doctrine of Will seems to have provided a mission and to have met her psychological and emotional need for expectation, devotion and objective response...
...vacuum reminiscent of that following the death of Stalin. Like other leaders of his ilk, Daley fancied himself immortal and groomed no successor. Even his son, State Sen. Richard M. Daley, whom the mayor supposedly wanted to succeed him, had been given no position of power from which to exert control over his father's domain. And many regulars hate...
...University has made steady progress in the past few years in increasing the number of tenured women faculty and will continue to exert its best efforts to comply with affirmative action procedures in making future tenure decisions," the report said