Word: havoc
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...other features of its life also. The current ideas afloat in our colleges, the tutorial system, the division into college units, and freedom from minor restrictions common in early American institutions--are fruits of such contact. Although many of the mental sprigs brought home from abroad would certainly wreak havoc if grafted on the American educational tree, a little instinct for selection can make the foreign contacts all profit and no loss...
When the Middlebury Campus views with severe alarm and stoic horror the erection of such a dormitory as the proposed Varsity, now planned for the Mount Auburn regions, it ignores the havoc wrought by time and neglect. Such lavishness may at first appear too Roman for a New England college but experience has shown that the saviour of youthful virility lies in the fact that eventually the "porters" will dwindle into a lone and not over magnificent janitor; that the "maids and bellboys", if such there be, will fade into legend: that the pomp of circumstance will prove disappointingly evanescent...
Money and men poured after the waters into the Mississippi basin. State militia went into action, forcing stubborn and panicky people to leave their homes. Secretary Hoover established an executive base at Memphis. All around raged tragedy, havoc, cosmic comedy...
Another time, workmen roped off a main London thoroughfare, spat on their palms, swung picks all morning, sat on the edge of the gaping asphalt to eat their lunches, continued their havoc until sundown, then returned to their colleges and usual clothes. Weeks of traffic congestion failed to reveal the hoax...
...winds playing with the leaves of the Delphic oracle could have wrought no more havoc than students attempting to discover preceding examination papers from the morass at Widener. One presumes that in their pristine state the files were blessed with a certain system and order; after a day of handling, however, they are reduced to woeful complexity. Only those courses ending at the midyear are guaranteed the safe haven of being bound in book form. The others, the whole courses, are destined to lurk unseen or at any rate unfond in a maze of un-alphabetized sheets...