Word: pile
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...says her brother's unique style drove their mother crazy when they were growing up in suburban Detroit. "To her, his room looked like had his pile of dirty clothes and his pile of neat clothes...
...body bags that became a repellent cliche of pre-Jan. 16 antiwar oratory, and that have been so remarkably scarce through the first three weeks of actual war, might pile up quickly, though probably nowhere near as high as Saddam Hussein's propagandists suggest. But how many soldiers' deaths are likely if the attack begins next week, the week after, a month later, two months later? How many Iraqi civilians might die in the meantime from U.S. bombing? What number of casualties, and over how long a period, can the U.S. stand without a disastrous loss in public support...
...black humor. Lined up for execution, the main character sees his condemned colleagues fall dead in a hail of bullets. Only he and a young girl remain alive, spared by blanks and cynical commissars. Nearly dead from starvation, he is hauled into a makeshift morgue and buried in a pile of corpses...
...insist and insist again, by Vague Generalities. We abhor V.G.'s, we skim right past them, we start wondering what kind of C to give from the first V.G. we encounter; and as they pile up, we decide C: (Harvard being Harvard, one does not give D's. Consider C- a failure). Why? Not because they are a sign the student does not know the material, or hasn't thought creatively, or any of that folly. They simply make tedious reading. "Locke is a transitional figure." "The whole thing boils down to human rights." Now I ask you, I have...
Artful Equivocations are even worse; lynx-eyed sly little rascals that we are, we see right through them. (Up to exam 40. Then you lynx eyes droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough...