Word: peculiar
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Many industrial occupations have their own peculiar hazards. Coal miners are particularly susceptible to "black lung," or anthracosis, a disease caused by inhaling coal dust. Asbestos workers are known to develop cancer from breathing in asbestos particles. Now an outbreak of heart disease in a Wisconsin ammunition plant has brought out the fact that workers who handle nitroglycerin can develop a dangerous dependency on it. They can suffer heart pains and even death when denied exposure to the explosive...
...Jupiter's atmosphere. How could a solid float in gases? The authors explain that the phenomenon becomes possible when certain mixtures of gases are subjected to high enough pressures. As one of the gases in the mix becomes liquefied and then begins to solidify under increasing pressure, a peculiar reversal takes place: the solidifying mass-like water turning into ice-becomes lighter and less dense, capable of floating in the surrounding mixture of liquids and gases...
...paragon of fair play, he nevertheless tends to characterize non-Nordic types as "a low specimen of the Central American half-breed" or as "ratty, dark-skinned" people. In his books black men shuffle, gawk and sputter things like "ah never seed such muscles befo'." Even more peculiar is Doc's method of dealing with the criminals he captures. With confidence in his lofty motives, he ships them to his "crime college" in upstate New York, where their criminal tendencies are corrected by brain surgery...
CHEAP vituperation and petty chauvinism are rarely more appropriate than on Harvard-Yale weekend. Traditionally, most of it comes from the other side. We could laugh off their peculiar taunts of "Yale Reject!", knowing the opposite to be almost exclusively the case. Down in New Haven, one could assume, they had nothing better to do than buy blue and white scarves (the official Yale Scarf, incidentally, is manufactured in Harvard Square), carve their initials into the tables down at Mory's, import girls for football weekends. Harvard was more worldly than that, initiating academic, political and social trends which Yale...
...Professor Parkinson's painstaking work has a weakness, it lies in its treatment of all those already well-known, oftretold Hornblower adventures-in quarterdeck and boudoir-that did so much to confound Great Britain's enemies in the Napoleonic Wars. It was Horatio Hornblower's peculiar character to combine brilliant seamanship and a calculating mind with such inner ravages of self-doubt that though he never lost a battle-or very rarely so-it always seemed he was about to. From a score of perilous voyages one may perhaps recall the long patrol to Latin America...