Word: sopped
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...doing his job well. When a Russian troop train must be rushed through to put down the 1956 Hungarian uprising, he shunts off local traffic to let it pass. He rejects a colleague's suggestion that the switchmen should hold it up. Such a gesture is a frivolous sop to their own private feelings about the Russians, he argues. How long could the switchmen delay them? he asks. "They'd still have made it by tomorrow morning...
...political purposes. Says one White House aide candidly: "No Administration was ever voted out for running a deficit. But some have been voted out because of a recession." There is also the suspicion that Kennedy considers the reform proposals expendable, included them in his package program only as a sop to Ways and Means Chairman Mills, a longtime champion of real tax reform...
...crisis comes swiftly. The temperature inside the star rises suddenly above one billion degrees, and strange reactions take place in its tortured center. Vast numbers of tiny particles called neutrinos escape into space, and powerful gamma rays turn energy into matter. Both these processes sop up so much energy that the great star suddenly collapses, exploding inward like a shattered TV picture tube. And as the great star's material starts to fall toward its center, gravitation pulls the stuff along so strongly that its speed quickly approaches the speed of light, which astronomers call respectfully "the relativistic limit...
...Spiegel affair, which precipitated the crisis that is now over a month old. Dr. Adenauer has explained the "facts" of the case in a television speech that answered none of the important questions and satisfied nobody. The official investigation of the case--seemingly undertaken more as a political sop to the Justice Minister than as a serious effort at determining motive and responsibility for the arrests-- has yielded a report that Bonn is so far unwilling to release...
Toughness & Tenderness. "Be like a sponge," N. C. Wyeth said. "Sop up every experience of life, and then don't forget to wring yourself dry in expression." What Wyeth has sopped up in his 45 years is the vast interior of a geographically limited world in which "every hill is a personal feeling." If his paintings seem stark and spare, it is because he wants to "pull things down to simplicity." He has an unerring sense of composition: anything that interferes with "the essence" of a picture is ruthlessly eliminated. He prefers winter over summer, because in winter...