Word: inert
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This summer's anti-gypsy-moth campaign in New Jersey has sprayed 41,000 acres of infested forest with carbaryl, an insecticide that takes only hours to turn into inert residue. Carbaryl is therefore less effective than DDT, which stays on the foliage and kills caterpillars for weeks or months. Lest the cautious chemical fail to save the forests, New Jersey's moth fighters also plan to drop by airplane 100,000 cardboard traps baited with a synthetic sex scent to attract male gypsy moths. New Jersey conservationists hope that when caterpillars that survive spraying turn into mature...
...much of the tooth seems to be inert that some dental surgeons hoped that a transplant would not set off rejection reactions. They thought it might be possible to graft teeth from one person to another in much the same way as the bloodless cornea of the eye can be grafted, and for essentially the same reasons. Some dentists at last week's meeting claimed successes in person-to-person transplants that have lasted from two to four years. But they had no X rays to show that the roots were still healthy. Soon, their colleagues predicted, the crowns...
...Jump. Bucky's peculiar distinction is that, while many of his fellow intellectuals are depressed by the "materialistic" 20th century, he is exhilarated. He is excited by "humanity's epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic 19th century into the dynamic, abstract 20th century." He feels that there is an "important reorientation of mankind, from the role of an inherent failure, as erroneously reasoned by Malthus, and erroneously accepted by the bootstrap-anchored custodians of civilization's processes, to a new role for mankind, that of an inherent success." He is sure the whole world...
Lambuth despised inert verbs: "To be is the weakest of all verbs because it merely joins two ideas together with a colorless glue." He liked verbs that are "busy doing or making something." Not When Elizabeth was queen, but When Elizabeth reigned. He sought concrete words standing for "material things which may be seen, touched, tasted, smelled or heard." No Lambuth student could write that a man indulged in an act of generosity; he wrote that a man gave a dollar to a tramp. Abstract: He gave vehement and conclusive expression to his anger. Concrete: His fist landed squarely...
Brains, beards, civil rights, silly riots and sex-such is the confusing image of this year's U.S. collegian. His mind delights; his morals dismay. He is something new: a cross between the inert "apathetes" of the late '50s and the naive activists of the early '60s. He might be called a "personalist"-one who stresses self-development-and he sounds like this...