Word: staling
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Because of misgivings, one first-class hospital may refuse to use blood collected by another with equally high but different standards. After 21 days, blood is too stale to be used whole, though its plasma can still be extracted: in New York gallons of precious blood are discarded after 21 days, but some outdated blood that should have gone down the drain goes into patients instead...
Presenting himself as proof that the universe is foul, Burroughs achieves the somewhat irrelevant honesty of hysteria as he writes of a malevolent world of users and pushers, of a mad conspiracy of spider-eyed manipulators who sell each other "adulterated shark repellent, cut antibiotics, condemned parachutes, stale antivenom, inactive serums and vaccines, leaking lifeboats." All pity is mockery ("Yes I know it all. The finance company is repossessing your wife's artificial kidney. They are evicting your grandmother from her iron lung"). All degradations are cherished: a coroner named Autopsy Ahmed makes a fortune peddling an Egyptian worm...
...musical extravaganza as those tales were tall. "A magnificent orchestral sneeze"--a cross between an orchestra tuning and a radio warming up--opened the fairy tales. In the "Viennese Musical Clock," the percussion section went admirably wild; but the music beneath, no matter how heavily sugarcoated, tasted stale. The third movement, "Song," and the dance in the fifth, however, showed the better side of Kodaly's talents; in the third, the viola (Jean Quillen) played a delicate folk melody to a harpsichord accompaniment. The orchestra handled its end of the music superbly. Swoboda again put on a show...
...stale question of "house stereotypes" is being pushed to the background this year, in a fresh research project aimed at discovering if Harvard Houses really differ...
...hour was late in the conference room in Brussels where the Common Market foreign ministers were considering Britain's application to join Europe's Six. Stale cigar smoke hung in the air, and papers were scattered over the tables. Picking up one of the English-language documents, France's Maurice Couve de Murville took the floor to lambaste each argument it contained. Suddenly a hand tugged at Couve's sleeve and a voice whispered in his ear: the paper he was so ruthlessly demolishing was not from the British at all-but was an English translation...