Word: numb
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Army has a laconic term for chronic befuddlement: snafu.* Last week U.S. citizens knew that gasoline rationing and rubber requisitioning were snafu. For months the people and their leaders had pussyfooted around the twin horrors. There were orders and counter-orders. All were different. The people, numb with bewilderment, choked with wrath, gave...
...public was also studying radio. War has sensitized many a normally numb ear to the profound difference between commentators like Mutual's Raymond Gram Swing, whose concern has been wholly with the news, and one like Mutual's $130,000-a-year Gabriel Heatter, whose soughing sanctimony and elephantine fight talk sound most appropriate when he urges the oily virtues of "my good friend, Kreml Shampoo...
...searching party by a hair. A Chinese contraband runner loaded them at midnight into his small sampan, nosed upstream through sleet and snow for Free China. Japanese troops lined the right bank, Chinese the left; detection meant being riddled by both sides. At journey's end, too numb to move, they were carried through ice water and mud by the cheerful, barelegged boatman, given a royal welcome by Chinese villagers who had been raided and pillaged by Japanese for years...
...lights up fireflies, and also lights up the bacteria which often make ponds and seawater phosphorescent. Working with flaskfuls of luminous bacteria, the researchers found that alcohol and anesthetics, when added in small amounts to the bacterial solutions, dimmed their luminescence. Greater amounts extinguished the glow altogether. (Conclusions: narcotics numb consciousness by affecting enzyme reactions, not-as hitherto suspected-by acting as fat solvents; human consciousness, which these drugs affect, is at least partly a chemical process sustained by enzymes.) The sulfa drugs acted like one group of narcotics on the enzyme, putting activities to sleep. (Conclusion: the sulfa drugs...
...Another, told that his hand was numb, allowed his palm to be fingered by a match flame...