Word: outset
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...world's first air force is born: warring France uses tethered balloons to observe and direct troops, a tactic later employed in the American Civil War. During WW II, barrage balloons (4) and their slicing cables help protect various sites, including London, against low-flying enemy planes. From the outset, balloons are used to study the atmosphere, eventually lifting men to the brink of space (5). Sports ballooning takes off in the 20th century. The Atlantic is crossed in 1978, the Pacific in 1981, both by U.S. teams. But the last conquest, circumnavigating the globe, remains, well...
...newly hired assistant professor would be promoted to tenure in due course. It does sometimes happen here, and I wish it could have happened for Masten, but as I observed to your reporter it is seldom easy to make an irrefutable case for promoting a young scholar at the outset of his or her career when it might have been possible to choose instead an older scholar of the highest distinction and bring that person to Harvard...
Billy Lynch, a lovely, funny man (a hopeless, lifelong drunk), is dead in middle age. His funeral is just over, and his friends and family have gathered at a quiet bar in the Bronx to forgive his ghost and congratulate his widow. So Alice McDermott sets down at the outset of Charming Billy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 280 pages; $22), a rueful shrug of a novel whose strong, shrewd opening pages should be taught in college writing classes...
...didn't have much life [at the outset]," Scott said. "We couldn't get out of the blocks...
...killings in New Jersey (one by another child), the killings and shootings of and by schoolchildren in Mississippi and Kentucky, and the stories of newborns left in toilets or in Dumpsters ought to have aroused great public feelings of pity or rage. But they were defused at the outset by the fact that one knew they would be analyzed into the ground on TV. Everyone in America is on television. A child is killed, and moments later a distraught relative appears on camera perfectly composed because he or she has had plenty of practice with a camcorder...