Word: hoards
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...several trips to Puerto Rico for other friends. None of this was true, police said later, but people in the neighborhood began estimating how much money she might have stashed away in her modest row house. Someone guessed $35,000. Someone guessed more. There was even talk of a hoard of $45 million. None of this was true either-her only income is her monthly $247 Social Security check, and her only saving consists of a prepaid burial-but when the rumors started spreading last week, a crowd of 300 curiosity seekers gathered in front of her house...
...their gold holdings from the old official rate of $35 an ounce to the prevailing market price, thus multiplying the value of their reserves with the scratch of a pen. The U.S., which has not joined the revaluation trend, still reckons the worth of its 8,516-ton gold hoard at $35 an ounce, or $ 11.5 billion...
...More important, speculators round the world have concluded that diamonds are a good hedge against inflation, currency weakness and political uncertainty. In the diamond centers of Antwerp, New York City, Bombay and especially Tel Aviv, industry middlemen have been paying price premiums up to 100% to buy and hoard uncut stones. Banks have been buying diamonds for customers' portfolios, instead of stocks. "Some people have bought kilos' worth of diamonds," says Antwerp Diamond Cutter Sylvain Zucker. Disgusted by the speculation, New York's Tiffany & Co. ran a newspaper ad in March telling customers: "Diamonds are too high...
Berner's strategy is similar to his attack on Curtiss-Wright in 1948. Management had been piling up cash; Berner, then a Wall Street lawyer, badgered it to distribute the hoard in a special dividend to shareholders. Curtiss-Wright refused, so Berner launched a proxy fight, forced the company to dispense dividends liberally and eventually had himself elected a director and chief executive...
With its splendid hoard of half a million words, the Oxford English Dictionary is the central bank of the language -a trove of Latinate abstractions. Old Frisian or Old French oddments, fubsy eloquences of Middle English and exotic intrusions from the Arabic. It contains a million and a half quotations to show the historical progress of language, the way its vocabularies have stirred, matured in meaning and eventually decayed. But the logomaniac's great joy in the O.E.D. is to wander through it looking for the glint of old coins: sippet, maumetry, floscule, gimmer, the wonderfully dark deathbird...