Word: husked
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...average urban school superintendent serves only two and a half years today, compared with five years in the 1970s, says Samuel Husk, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools in Washington...
Despite yearly salaries often exceeding $100,000, 27 superintendents in urban school systems left their jobs in the last year-and-a-half, Husk says. Of this group, more than half were "bought out, forced out or forcefully retired" before their contracts had been fulfilled...
...mourn the loss of a plaster saint. That saint, the venerated one with the windblown corona, was a dried husk. The man who had the great thoughts and spun the strange theories that inspired that veneration was young, full of vigor and turbulence and passion. He was hardly alone; all his organs worked as well as his brain. His household was squirming with babies when he began his greatest work, on general relativity. Einstein's physics flourished not in the absence of life but in its fullness. His scientific life blossomed at the same time as the rest...
...poetic naturalism. The bums in Ironweed were not noble, but they had their own gravelly, poignant voices. The family Francis left behind was ordinary as linoleum, but their emptiness left a sympathetic ache in the reader's gut. Francis was drab and cramped on the outside, that husk of a booze-wracked body, but he didn't live there. He came to life inside, with way too many other people -- the loves, enemies and chances he had lost -- in the decaying mansion of his memories. What a lovely movie might dwell there...
They still do, but today monumental is a husk of a word. In the past ten years, it has decayed to mean nothing more than "very big." American cities are now generously speckled with abstract ironmongery: sculpture that means nothing but is part of the perfunctory etiquette of urban development, most of it larger than it needs to be. Locked in a losing battle with the megacity environment, it manages to look both arrogant and depleted...