Word: lull
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Unemployment increased slightly to 6.2% of the labor force in March, from 6.1% in February, but the rise was insignificant. Moreover, economic growth is likely to rebound sharply in the second quarter after a winter lull caused by snowstorms and the coal strike. The threat to the economy is less stagflation than plain old inflation...
...that there is a momentary lull in the outpouring of Watergate books, another legacy of the Nixon era needs closer scrutiny. This is the notion, propagated by Richard Nixon, that Government and the press have an adversary relationship. What Nixon meant by the phrase he made perfectly clear in a letter to Spiro Agnew during the 1968 campaign: "When news is concerned, nobody in the press is a friend-they are all enemies." But why the press should have seized upon the adversary description and proudly flaunted it ever since is harder to understand...
True, Adams overwrites almost every scene, but he manages to turn that fault into a virtue. Length can lull disbelief and make the unlikely seem familiar. Snitter, for instance, has been the victim of mind-control experiments and consequently hallucinates a fair amount of gibberish: "There's a mouse - a mouse that sings - I'm bitten to the brains and it never stops raining - not in this eye any way." The effect of a terrier doing his impression of the fool in King Lear is at first disconcerting. It grows less so with each appearance, and those...
...domestic wars have simmered down as well. For three years, the Christmas holidays at South Boston High School had merely meant a lull in the racial conflict over busing. This year school officials have unplugged the airport metal detectors once used to screen students for weapons, the police have been removed from the halls, and Southie students are at peace. Said one kid: "After a while, you get to know them. You just get along." In Chicago, one of the nation's most stubbornly segregated cities, a new busing program drew angry words this fall but no violent resistance...
...That will about match what board members and other economists consider to have been the basic, or underlying, rate throughout 1977-or 1976 for that matter. The officially reported rate in recent months has been lower-3.7% in October-but that was an illusory result of a temporary lull in food prices. The respite is now ending; in November wholesale prices, which often foreshadow what will happen to living costs, rose at an annual rate...