Word: haphazard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After carefully reviewing the haphazard use of capital punishment, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart concluded in 1972 that the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment "in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual." A majority of five Justices used words like "arbitrary," "capricious" and "freakish" about the application of the penalty. They joined together to shut down the nation's death rows with a ruling that sounded to many like a constitutional ban on executions. Last week all possibility of such a ban ended when the Justices voted seven to two that capital...
Except for a few wealthy citizens who dig private wells in their back gardens, New Yorkers get most of their water from a haphazard network of more than 100 public pumps. In addition, bands of "tea-water men" fill up their carts at springs near Fresh Water Pond, north of the city, and then sell the water in the streets for 3 pence a hogshead. But New York pump water is brackish, so much so that horses of out-of-town strangers refuse to drink...
These are hard words, but the continuing spread of the disease may force Washington to change his orders. For even though the spread is sometimes worsened by the haphazard inoculation of soldiers, the Army's own chief physician, John Morgan, insists that "wherever inoculation has once had a fair trial, those prejudices, that are apt to infect vulgar and weak minds, soon vanish." Thus the solution to Washington's problem may be not to forbid the treatment but to isolate and then inoculate every soldier in his Army...
There is a new and deep concern this year about the historically haphazard way in which the vice-presidential nominees are chosen-after George McGovern's 1972 fiasco with Senator Tom Eagleton, after the resignation of Spiro Agnew, after the ascension of unelected Gerald Ford. A study on the subject, released this week by Harvard's Kennedy Institute, maintained that "the present selection practices contain an inherent and unacceptable degree of risk." The odds are now 1 to 2, the study judges, that the Vice President will one day become President...
...They mix arguments from different theoretical perspectives eclectically, conflating, for example, Daniel Bell's claim that manual labor in the "post-industrial" U.S. is becoming progressively less important with Stanley Aronowitz's that the labor force is being generally proletarianized. The book jumps from general to particular in so haphazard a manner as to make it easier to find anecdotes about Harold Geneen's world vision or the loss of shoemaking jobs in Lynn than precise information about the importance of the global corporations in the U.S. economy...