Word: pile
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...athlete who's top of the pile would need a coach is a question that puzzles a lot of people. What's often overlooked is that coaches can be handy for stuff outside their field of expertise. In the 1980s, when the austere Ivan Lendl ruled tennis, he discovered a most satisfying use for his Australian mentor, Tony Roche. Relaxing in his hotel room before a match, Lendl hated the way his parents would call from Czechoslovakia to bombard him with tactical advice. Loath to be rude, he came upon the idea of excusing himself, then passing the phone...
...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, we do 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...
Artful equivocations are even worse; lynx-eyed sly little rascals that we are, we see right through them. (Up to exam 40. Then our 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 or not this is a good thing...
...reproduced photograph taken Jan. 2 in Patong, in southern Thailand is unsavory. Two men, beers in hand, stand on a sandy beach in the tropical sunshine, hard at work on their respective tans. But there is something deeply disturbing about the image. Behind the tourists is a massive pile of debris, a jarring reminder of the tragic tsunami that swept through South Asia—and tens of thousands of lives—on Dec. 26. In the aftershock of this cataclysmic disaster, with a death toll expected to surpass 150,000 and an expected cost surely to be counted...
...seen prisoners subjected to physical mistreatment, loud music, extreme temperatures and a lack of food, water and furniture. An FBI agent there observed that one detainee who had been left in a cell where the temperature had climbed above 100?? "was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night...