Word: lighter
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...sinking balloon, Billionaire U.S. Oilman J. Paul Getty promptly supplied his paladin with a suggested brief. Unaware that his hypothetical fellow travelers were to be Fidel Castro, British Playwright John Osborne and Philosopher-Demagogue Bertrand Russell, Getty wrote: "I am only 13 stone [182 Ibs.] and therefore probably lighter than the rest. If there are other millionaires there, I'm probably the youngest at 68, so the oldsters should go." Finally came the hard sell: "I probably pay more taxes in more countries than anyone in the world...
Curiously, Sutherland came to Donizetti and Bellini from a background in Wagner, a reversal of the process that usually finds a singer moving from lighter to heavier roles. Sydney-born, the daughter of a tailor, she concentrated at first on Wagnerian roles because "I had the build for it" (she stood 5 ft. 9 in., weighed 224 Ibs., now weighs 170). Eventually, on the advice of her husband, Australian Pianist Richard Bonynge, she decided that the bel canto repertory was where she belonged. She put in seven years at Covent Garden while developing the voice that would lead...
...must reduce the weight of nuclear warheads. Such a development of lighter weapons promises the mobility of our missiles so vital to the survival of our retaliatory power after a first strike by an aggressor. Weapons light enough to be moved about on trucks and small, swift submarines could virtually assure our decisive deterrent power...
...mainly on the men and materiel of limited war. Around the world, Army units are getting a badly needed transfusion of modern equipment: the fully automatic M-14 rifle (which finally is replacing the famed M-1 of World War II), the lightweight M-60 machine gun, a lighter and livelier Jeep, the M-60 tank, and enough M-113 armored personnel carriers to give a lift to every footslogging infantryman in the Seventh Army...
Nonetheless, from A to zyzzogeton (a genus of South American leaf hoppers), Merriam-Webster's Third Edition is lighter and brighter than its immediate predecessor. It weighs 13½ v. 16½ Ibs., has 2,662 v. 3,194 pages, contains 450,000 v. 600,000 entries. Gone are the gazetteer, the biographical dictionary, and 100,000 obsolete or nonlexical terms, such as the names of characters in Dickens. In are 100,000 brand-new terms, from astronaut, beatnik, boo-boo, countdown, den mother and drip-dry, to footsie, hard sell, mccarthyism, no-show, schlemiel, sit-in, wage dividend...