Word: lighten
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...this drunken lecher with insolent ambitions had the power to make troubled people feel better-to lighten souls, as De Jonge puts it. Animals and children loved him. In his own way he wanted to be what the Tsar and Tsarina believed him to be: the savior of Holy Russia. But even if Rasputin had been an angel, he would have been too late. "A kind of frenzy has seized people," Princess Catherine Radziwill wrote in 1913. Russia had turned into a "very large lunatic asylum" of manic searchers, from table-tapping spiritualists to bomb-tossing anarchists. The whole country...
...Cubism is a fad with many facets. American frivolity in the fine tradition of hula hoops and skateboards. Sillier than a corporate executive on a pogo stick, it could lighten the national blue period. But perhaps because the Museum of Modern Art has found the cube aesthetically comparable to Mondrian and Picasso, the trend has assumed and unbecoming air of profundity...
Thus summarized, The Safety Net sounds like Dallas auf Deutsch. But Böll has the technical skills to lighten weighty social themes. His best narrrative trick is to keep the public Stürm und Drang at bay and focus on the private lives laid bare by pervasive surveillance. Suspense takes a back seat. Somewhere, hazily defined terrorists are poised to punish Tolm for his real and imagined sins of omission. Will the assault be by cake bomb, a flight of mechanical birds stuffed with explosives or a mysterious boy with a "bomb in his head"? Who will attempt...
...small businessman is acting like he's in an airplane threatening to crash," says Mike McKevitt, director of the National Federation of Independent Business, which has 502,000 members. "He's throwing stuff out the windows to lighten up-trimming back inventories, prolonging payments, laying off workers-anything to keep going a while longer...
Potter Stewart, retired Supreme Court Justice, on increasing the court's membership to lighten the work load: "I don't think that would solve the problem. Life on the court would have been a lot simpler for me if I had no colleagues...