Word: fritter
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...packed freeways, bottlenecked bridges and overstuffed airports. Now they face another season of grinding commutes: in many U.S. cities, the rush hour has grown into a hellish crush that lasts virtually from sunup till sundown. For U.S. businesses, the meter is running. Companies are losing money as employees fritter away their hours in a transportation standstill. Messengers fail to deliver important documents on time. Sales representatives miss their plane connections and are unable to show up for the big pitch. Even expensive private jets get caught in holding patterns, leaving subordinates in limbo while their bosses circle overhead...
...Treasury issues -- in effect, financing part of the federal budget deficit. Legislators, however, have proposed using the money for everything from expanding current Social Security benefits to paying for housing for the homeless. Others clamor for a tax cut. Many Washington watchers fear that the Government will simply fritter away the reserve, leaving nothing to the future. Says Geoffrey Carliner, executive director of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass.: "As politicians see the trust fund build up, the temptation to spend it on today's recipients or to reduce payroll taxes will only grow...
...ways of telling a story. Unlike the domestic tragedy of Williams and Miller and O'Neill, Our Town took the sweeping view that a misspent life is not a pitiable exception but a lamentable norm. Life, Wilder argued, is almost too precious to be wasted on the living, who fritter it away in trivialities...
Americans, on the other hand, appear delighted to work for nothing. Secure in their anticipation of future employment, they hasten to fritter away their summers in such congenial and prestigious surroundings. Such indeed is their enthusiasm for the Mother of Parliaments that many are willing not only to work eight hours a day without the slightest monetary reward but also to pay for the privilege of doing so through various exorbitant programs...
...career has followed the dutiful, almost square path one would expect from the characters he projects. When he saw that he was not receiving the kinds of parts he wanted back in the '60s, he did what the forthright, somewhat self-righteous John Book would have done. Rather than fritter away his talent as a bit actor on TV car-chase shows, he all but dropped out for seven years, turning down 90% of the jobs he was offered. With books borrowed from the public library, he learned how to put two pieces of wood together in a presentable fashion...