Word: graduality
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...after three decades of declines or stagnation, as labor shortages force employers to pay premiums to hire and retain workers. "Wealth is the icing on the cake, but it's wages that bake the cake," says Diane Swonk, deputy chief economist at the bank First Chicago NBD. These gradual earnings gains might signal an increase in inflation, because compensation makes up the bulk of most employers' expenses. But the glory of the economy today is its remarkable balance. While labor costs are indeed rising, they are largely offset by the growing productivity of American workers, who are among the most...
...knowledge of the troubled family story emerges from half-heard whispers and details gleaned from emotional outbursts. His desire to rip through the fabric of dense half-truths and "cooked up" stories becomes nothing less than a quest, a constant crusade for answers inextricably linked with his gradual maturation...
...answers come erratically, as a scrap of conversation here or a deathbed confession there, and Deane's irregular structure mirrors the gradual unfurling of the family secrets. A series of brief vignettes spanning more than twenty years, unevenly spaced and heavily concentrated in the days of the narrator's extreme youth, reveals information as the narrator learns it, Deane writes with all the immediacy and intrusive intimacy of a diarist, and even the wildest, most implausible developments in the tale seem like mere fact when conveyed in his narrator's steady voice...
...their point is nor readily apparent, become increasingly lucid as the mystery unravels. Cavalcades of transient images fill three or four pages at a time and then vanish, but their aftereffects are less ephemeral. The constant aggregation of detail that comes with passing years explains exactly the boy's gradual understanding of his tortured familial history...
...Karnuta that I have heard the sound. Two minutes later, I am incredulous when she shows me a printout of my responses. Having failed to hear a range of high-toned pitches, I learn I have mild symptoms of presbycusis--"old-age hearing," Karnuta informs me--caused by gradual loss of the 30,000 tiny hairlike cells in the inner ear that respond to sound by signaling the auditory nerve to send electrical impulses to the brain. The noise of daily life, from loud music to jet planes to machinery, contributes to presbycusis, but the condition goes hand in hand...