Word: prosaic
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ALMOST every great city has a river. The poetic notion is that flowing water brings commerce, delights the eye, and cools the summer heat. But there is a more prosaic reason for the close affinity of cities and rivers. They serve as convenient, free sewers...
...REST of the difficulties with a merger are a good deal more prosaic. How, for instance, can 800-900 Harvard undergraduates be persuaded to move up a Radcliffe? Perhaps enthusiasm for the idea of coed living will carry a few pioneers up to the inferior quarters at the 'Cliffe and the first two male freshmen stuck in a double in Briggs won't know what hit them. But already a number of House Masters sense a large gap between the number of Harvard students who support coeducational living in theory and the number who would be willing to move...
...hospital cost comes from inevitable--and desirable--sources. The ceaseless stream of marvels that medical researchers produce certainly save more lives. But they also gobble more dollars in the process. And the other major component of the hospital cost increase--higher wages for cooks, janitors, and the other prosaic workers who help care for the patients -- helped solve another obvious social need. The semi-sweatshop laber practices of the 1950's hospitals had to end; unfortunately, ending them meant hiking hospital charges another step...
...scheduled to leave for Texas later in the day, the new first family planned to spend Inauguration night in the White House. Inevitably, there would be many differences in atmosphere and routine. Among the changes: the Nixons plan to hold interdenominational prayer services in the mansion. On a more prosaic level, Pat Nixon may set up a beauty salon for the convenience of White House distaffers and the family...
...burned on its pad in January 1967, the translunar vehicle was extensively redesigned. Man's first voyage to the moon also bore the imprint of two farsighted Presidents: John F. Kennedy, who exhorted the nation to "set sail on this new sea," and Lyndon Johnson, who in more prosaic language insisted to Americans that "space is not a gambit, not a gimmick," but a realistic challenge that could not be evaded...