Word: lull
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Dienbienphu's commander, General Christian de Castries, took advantage of the lull to resurvey his battered position, and he decided that a couple of northwestern outposts were too exposed. He therefore abandoned these outposts under sharp Red fire and realigned most of his 12,000-man force inside one bristling, unbroken perimeter some 1 ½ miles in diameter, leaving only one strong point isolated three miles to the south. De Castries stiffened the new perimeter with fresh, air-dropped reinforcements-infantry volunteers with only a few hours' parachute instruction and no practice-and built up his ammunition stocks...
Yesterday's robbery followed a month-long lull in the robber's activities around the University. Toohy said last month during this lull that the thief was scared, but probably would return because of "unusual success" in his past thefts. There is little evidence concerning the identity of the criminal, he added...
...said that Chrysler's 1954 models were not selling as well as expected. But Ford and General Motors still roared ahead, and total auto production jumped 66% from the previous week. Railroad traffic was still dropping and steel production was rising more slowly than expected after the holiday lull. Credit was still easing, and in Manhattan interest rates on commercial loans dropped to the lowest point (2 1/8) in three years. However, consumers showed no signs of easing up their big buying. Department store sales were climbing; they edged up 1% over the same week a year...
Most businessmen, looking at their own sales and order charts, saw only a shower. Even those who had once talked loudly of depression now spoke of a "rolling readjustment," a "mild recession" or a "lull." The new cliché was "let's be realistic." Being "realistic" meant a drop, at most, in the gross national product of 5% to 10% (or back to about the level of 1952) and a rise in unemployment to 3,500,000. But such "realism" did not necessarily mean that the economy would be much shaken...
...doomsayers who see every business lull as the onset of recession came some advice from Oldtime New Dealer David E. Lilienthal: "A country can become a hypochondriac too, just as a person can. A country can fall into the habit of popping a fever thermometer into its mouth to take its economic temperature every hour on the hour, listening anxiously to its every heartbeat, and forever psychoanalyzing itself. Frankly, we've had a bit too much of this lately...