Word: staleness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Schaefer, who moved temporarily to the department of human resources, is proud of his shake-up. Taking over a Cabinet colleague's desk, he believes, brings in fresh eyes and can inject new ideas into stale bureaucracy. He devised the plan while he was mayor of Baltimore from 1971 to 1987 because the city's departments "did not know they were interdependent." When he first proposed the idea to city officials, he recalls, "they thought it was silly. But the second time we got good results...
...thinks the key to long-term prosperity is steering as many members as possible into intimate groups such as Sunday-school classes or at-home Bible studies. Lawyer Larry Jones says he and wife Linda were initially "scared off" by Houston's Second Baptist, thinking it would be "some stale place that has no heartbeat." Instead they found all kinds of opportunities for close-knit fellowship and joined last December...
They started a Dear Mikhail-Dear George correspondence. When several of Gorbachev's letters reiterated stale positions in boilerplate language, Bush complained that they seemed to have been drafted by the Soviet Foreign Ministry (as indeed they had). That was part of the reason he suggested they hold their first meeting at Malta. The two hit it off spectacularly. Gorbachev came away convinced that Bush would not try to exploit his difficulties, while Bush developed an even deeper sense of engagement in the fate of a fellow leader...
Even though the cushion had not prevented them from breathing, the air they exhaled had become trapped in the beads. So when they inhaled, they drew in stale air that was low in oxygen. "You end up breathing back in what you've just breathed out," Thach explains. "All the oxygen gets used up." Adults have enough lung power to suck in sufficient oxygen through the pillow, but Kemp and Thach determined that babies could not. By testing rabbits that had the same lung size as infants, the pediatricians proved that rebreathing into the bead-filled cushions was fatal...
...these insights are not very original, and they are often expressed in cliches. Lines like "You have to be able to love someone enough to let them go" occur too frequently to be overlooked. This stale dialogue undermines the seriousness of the play's message...