Word: inert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...principle, the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court do not write laws, they merely apply them. They "breathe life, feeble or strong, into the inert pages of the Constitution and of statute books," wrote Justice Felix Frankfurter...
Most of the classical revivals at the National smell just as strongly of the lamp. Both Clifford Odets' Golden Boy and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd lie open and inert on the stage, as if they were exams to be passed and not theatrical experiences to be shared. Only Wild Honey, Michael Frayn's free adaptation of a play Chekhov wrote when he was still a student, strikes vital sparks, and this because Frayn treats the text as an organism that can flower with care and pruning. At 21, Chekhov was already halfway toward being...
They are randomly promiscuous: "Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties." Although they cast spells over their ex-husbands that reduced all three to inert household objects, their witchcraft is ordinarily mischievous rather than malign. When Alexandra wants to walk her dog on the beach without a leash, she simply conjures up a thunderstorm to drive bathers away...
Despite some occasionally effective scenes and characterizations, Heart Like a Wheel rarely lets us see beneath Shirley's facade of sheer determination to win. As Shirley spins toward success, her emotional world seems as inert as the metal of the wheel itself...
...contents of that refrigerator would be much more difficult to dispose of than all those ash-laden trucks. Coal ash is essentially inert and harmless. Used nuclear fuel rods, which are 12 ft. long and ½ in. in diameter and are fastened together in bundles reminiscent of the fasces carried by magisterial aides of ancient Rome, remain very dangerous. Contaminated by such fission products as strontium 90, cesium 137 and plutonium 239, they are not only physically hot (at several hundred degrees), but will remain radioactive for thousands of years...