Word: inertia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...where men and women address each other like creatures from different planets. Atwood's characters bitterly avoid human contact, as if under some delusion of strength in solitude and weakness in numbers. This is the generation of impermanence--of childless marriages and unmarried couples who "live together" out of inertia. The threat of nuclear war hangs over them perennially. The men and women in Dancing Girls respond not to each other, but only to their inward selves and how they might profit from someone else. In one story a man resists a women's advances by telling himself...
...with train ridership rebounding as a result of rising gasoline prices and Amtrak's new Northeast-corridor service, the Interior Department agreed to turn the building over to the Department of Transportation, which wanted to turn it back into a train station. By then, however, inertia had set in. Bills to transfer control died in committee. Finally last year, Congress passed a bill, as Moynihan put it, "to return the building to its use before Congress began fumbling with it." It authorizes the Government to spend $69 million more to undo what it did. Another $9 million has been...
...significant level of Anglican reunification with Rome at present seems very remote, if not impossible. But the Pope and Archbishop may have begun a process that could undo the inertia. Aside from future reunification, the "dialogue of charity" among separated Christians, the Pope claims, may already be contributing to an atmosphere of world peace. As he said in Liverpool, "We have to resolve important doctrinal issues. Yet already mutual love, our will for unity, can be a sign of hope in a divided world...
...numbers--or lack thereof--suggest that even the student governments which appear impressive with their hefty budgets and multiple services may be moving simply out of physical inertia. These governments seem to command little mandate or draw much ire. A Brown referendum earlier this spring appears to have been the victim of just this. The vote--on whether a new form of government should be adopted--failed, but just 800 undergraduates on the 5300-student campus, or 14 percent, went to the polls. Cornell's Senate Speaker Susan L. Bisom summarizes her attitude toward student-government in terms generally shared...
...Crimson displayed its inertia in this weekend's trip to Columbia and Penn. In both New York and Philadelphia, the batsmen split doubleheaders, dropping the opener and then capturing the nightcap. In all four games, Harvard came alive in the late innings after sluggish starts...