Word: slenderest
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gunslinger of words, Tom Stoppard shoots to kill with laughter. Dirty Linen, with its insert piece New-Found-Land, is probably the most killingly funny play he has written, though it is also the slenderest. Stoppard's works seem solidest when built on an earlier substructure. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead may be the sturdiest because it is built on Hamlet, and Travesties the wittiest since it springs from The Importance of Being Earnest...
...that some experts fear that the nation will be hard-pressed to meet its own demands later this year. The Government's best estimate is that less than 200 million bu. of wheat will be left in hand by the end of the marketing year in July, the slenderest reserve since the end of World War II. A strong winter wheat crop, which begins trickling onto the market in late May, would ease the pinch. To boost supplies in the meantime. President Nixon last week lifted import quotas that had been in effect since 1941, thus enabling U.S. customers...
...could-and many did-with justice point out that Walker Percy, John Updike and E.L. Doctorow, to name only the three most notable examples, had each produced a skilled, serious and powerful novel in 1971. This year, though, most of the customary groans and hisses were reserved for the slenderest and the newest categories. One judge, Lore Segal, a writer of juveniles, filed a solid minority objection when the children's book prize went to Fantasist Donald Barthelme for his arch and static The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering, Thithering Djinn...
...stiff new American attitude toward world trade. Part of the rationale is the feeling in the Administration among many businessmen that postwar American aid gives the U.S. a claim to special treatment in global competition. But gratitude, especially for those services rendered more than two decades ago, is the slenderest of reeds on which to build a foreign policy, particularly in the pragmatic realm of economics. An even more pervasive notion behind the increasingly tough U.S. trading stance is that American spending abroad has been largely an altruistic gesture that has almost exclusively benefited the recipients...
...bomb threat forebodes death just as effectively as a bomb on a passenger airplane. The nuclear threat, too, is just as uncertain and as uncontrollable to each individual as the threat to Flight 249 last week. President Kennedy had talked of "a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads" which threatens "every man, woman, and child." But unlike the airplane bomb scare, the nuclear threat is internal: we have created it ourselves. As a self-created or at least sanctioned agent of destruction, the nuclear threat evokes no community sense of solidarity. It is largely ignored...