Word: faint
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...also quick to pounce, often humorously, when he sniffed out dishonest intentions or botched executions. He acknowledges one novelist's gradations of ineptitude: "She began several years ago with writing unmitigated nonsense, and she now writes nonsense very sensibly mitigated." He praises with faint damns a pamphlet composed by the painter James McNeill Whistler, who "writes in an offhand, colloquial style, much besprinkled with French--a style which might be called familiar if one often encountered anything like it." Holding at arm's length a novel by Louisa May Alcott (Eight Cousins: or, the Aunt-Hill), he mentions the opinion...
...prisoners. To some degree these are arbitrary distinctions; the 19th century British painter Benjamin Haydon recorded his financial and artistic woes in 26 confidential volumes. As one of his last exhibitions fails, he laments, "They rush by thousands to see (Tom) Thumb. They push, they fight, they scream, they faint . . . They see my bills, my boards & don't read them." Months later he quotes King Lear, "Stretch me no longer on this tough World," and commits suicide. Is he a creator, a prisoner or merely, as Mallon has it, an apologist...
...sighting of VB 8B was made using a technique known as speckle interferometry, which eliminates most of the distortion that the earth's atmosphere causes to the faint emissions of light from so distant a body. Instead of taking one infrared exposure, the astronomers snapped 10,000 quick shots. A computer then blended all these shots into a composite image...
Once they had reached the hospital grounds, the victims seemed to faint, collapsing to the ground as if they had walked their final mile. They looked exhausted, like soldiers at the end of a battle. After waiting patiently, often for up to six hours, the victims were treated with civility and tenderness by the doctors and nurses. The army was there too, keeping the human traffic flowing without the usual pushing and shoving. The troops had set up 60 tents, which became instant wards for 20 people each. Some distance away, the army had set up a morgue to which...
...atmosphere is the quivering needle of the G-meter. For days, the needle has been fixed at zero, as if it were painted on the dial. Now it shudders to life and slowly begin to rise. Then there is an unmistakable whisper of rushing air, at first almost too faint to hear, then louder and louder still A faint red glow appears at the edges of the cockpit windows, then spreads across them and seems to curl up over the fuselage ... As it slows and the air no longer supports its raised nose, the forward landing gear falls with...