Word: inert
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ever since World War II-even through ten years of Soviet occupation-the Austrian government has been run jointly by the conservative People's Party and the Socialist Party, like two polite, equally weighted cousins on an inert seesaw. So scrupulously balanced is the coalition and the Proporz system of dividing up the jobs that, according to Viennese table talk, if there is one People's Party Putz-frau (charwoman) in a government building, there must be a Socialist Putzfrau too. After last November's elections, balance became stalemate; the two big parties have been haggling over...
Ryan's first victory against Tammany came in 1957, when upper West Side Democrats chose him as district leader. By 1960 he was popular enough to wrest the Congressional nomination for New York's 20th district from Tammany's inert Ludwig Teller. This fall, when Tammany and upstate Republicans reapportioned him into a largely unfamiliar district, Ryan scored a strong victory over De Sapio's man, Herbert Zelenko...
...many legislators, a sensible compomise was reached. Extremists crying "Human guinea pig!" had demanded that no doctor be allowed to give an investigational drug to a patient without telling him so. This would have made it impossible to compare the effects of a drug with those of an inert dummy (a placebo), as is now done in "double-blind" studies in which neither doctors nor patients know who is getting the active substance. So the law now says that doctors must tell patients what they are getting, "except where they deem it not feasible, or contrary to the best interests...
Summoned five years ago to the office of William C. Decker, then president of Corning Glass Works, Research Director William H. Armistead listened wide-eyed to a short but characteristically pithy discourse. "Glass is a very good material," mused Decker. "It's transparent, it's inert [non-corrosive]-but it breaks. Why don't you fix that?" Last week Corning announced that its scientists had come remarkably close to filling Decker's improbable order with a chemically strengthened glass called Chemcor. In a demonstration session at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel, Corning executives bent, twisted...
...ways at Newport Shipyard undergoing final polishing, then was set in the water for minor ballast shifts. At week's end her crew arrived to pace out the dwindling days before the meeting with the Australian challenger Gretel. By contrast, the Australian 12-meter lay inert under the hurried tread of a dozen shipfitters who had come aboard for final, perhaps desperate, changes...