Word: falterer
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Since plain American speech suffices only to describe the real world, a new vocabulary must be coined annually at colleges, where all experience has a heightened tone and ordinary superlatives falter. Life calls for adjectives that mean better than best, viler than vile, cooler than cool. The contemptibly stupid, the awesomely brilliant and the inexpressibly attractive all demand labels more vivid than last year's. This winter's college slang is real unreal...
...Cadets swept the individual medley, and though Seubold took second in the 100 freestyle and Fingleton took second in the backstroke, the meet came down to the final freestyle with Harvard just four points ahead. The varsity did not falter, however, and went on to sweep the 500 freestyle and the breaststroke in addition to winning the butterfly and the dive...
After hesitating briefly at the third floor, the ever-loaded lift then continued at its normal speed to the very bottom of the shaft and stuck there. The cables had remained firm, but the extra half ton of humanity apparently caused the breaking mechanism to falter...
...that crisis than the fact that though many of them were pro-segregationist Southerners, not a single one failed to live up to his oath and 100 were injured. As for McShane himself, Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach calls him "typecast" for the job. "I have never seen him falter under any kind of fire," says Katzenbach. "I always have the feeling about Jim that he takes his oath of office all over every morning...
...colonel of the Union Army and later governor general of the Philippines. But the memoirs reveal that he probably owed a lot more to his strong-willed mother, Mary Hardy, who fired him with ambition and lived close to him all her life to see that he did not falter...