Word: plummet
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...face of it, the prospects for cooperation between Washington and Moscow have dimmed perceptibly since their hot-line harmony of two weeks ago. The Russians, having lost the better part of their $2 billion, decade-long military investment in the Moslem world, also saw their prestige plummet to an all-time low among the Arab states (see THE WORLD). Determined to recoup their psychological loss at least, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin and his colleagues at this week's emergency meeting of the U.N. General Assembly faced the difficult task of inveighing against a fait accompli-Israel's shattering...
Bargaining Tool. Nothing could cripple the complex economy of the U.S. more swiftly or spectacularly than a rail strike. In a month-long walkout, the President told Congress last week, unemployment would rocket from the current 3.6% level to 15%, and the gross national product would plummet by nearly $100 billion-after a first quarter during which the $764 billion-a-year G.N.P. failed to show any substantial growth for the first time since 1961. Some 750,000 New York, Philadelphia and Chicago commuters would be stranded, and Defense Department shipments would be cut by as much as 40% -including...
...Lyndon Johnson's aides used to remark that the President was "more." No matter what he did, said the aide, the President would do it "more" than anybody else. When he was angry, everyone in the White House knew it. When he was charming, the birds would plummet from the trees. When he was rude or boorish, hardly anyone could be ruder or more boorish. And so, in recent weeks, after Johnson decided to be remote and aloof, it is not surprising that he has been more remote and aloof than just about any other President since Calvin Coolidge...
Opposition to alternative service comes from those who fear that enlistment in the army would plummet if men were given a respectable way out. The army, they say, would be left with those who failed to meet the physical or mental requirements of the volunteer agencies. In a middle-sized war, with the de facto exemptions of volunteer workers unaffected, alternative service couldn't compare with frontline duty...
...Yoknapatawpha County. Reason enough to exhume the hoary old horror and reissue its haunting license. But there are still better reasons. In the game of suspense, Mistress Radcliffe can tease with the best of them, and in the art of natural description she can pile a crag or plummet a chasm with any man short of Scott himself. True, the dear lady is one of the ickiest prigs who ever put quill to scented paper. Yet if in 1794 her virginal vaporings came on as symptoms of high sensibility, in 1966 they come off as conventions of high comedy...