Word: swollenness
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...town of Coamo, at least three automobiles plunged from a fallen bridge, killing eight. Nineteen bodies were pulled from the swollen Paso Seco River near the town of Santa Isabel, where another bridge gave way at the height of the deluge. Ironically, shortly after the weather front left Puerto Rico and gained sufficient new force to be classified as a tropical storm, Isabel was the name routinely assigned to it by the World Meteorological Organization. Isabel came close to gaining hurricane status as it approached the Florida coastline, but then rapidly dwindled in force...
Such was the unexpectedly heart-warming climax to a thoroughly manic chase after the biggest prize ever offered in the U.S. The award had swollen to epic size because no winner had been declared in seven successive plays of New York's Lotto 48 game. As the jackpot climbed first to $23 million, then $33.5 million and finally to its peak, serpentine lines of ticket buyers formed all over the state, each person shelling out $1 for each chance to choose two sets of six numbers. In Manhattan the queues were so long and contained such a variety of people...
This attack is somewhat ironic coming from Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University and editor of The American Scholar (the voice of Phi Beta Kappa), but Epstein's prose is refreshingly free of academic cant. In fact, he attempts to puncture the diseased, pseudo-critical language he calls "blurbissimo"--swollen with hyperbolic vacuity and written more or advertisements than reviews...
...strategic thinking necessary for a company in modern office equipment. Among De Benedetti's first moves was stepping up research and development--from $28.3 million in 1978 to $130 million last year. He abandoned the manufacture of money-losing mechanical equipment like typewriters. He also began paring down a swollen payroll. From 61,500 employees when he took over, the number dropped to 47,600 last year, and is still declining. As a result, productivity has leaped more than 22% annually for the past two years...
...cats roaring and coughing a few hundred yards away in their iron cages, jungle sounds floating to him through a screen of lush foliage. He "knew" what the Nile looked like, and the Niger, and the Amazon: muddier and steamier than the Seine, and lined with a frieze of swollen aspidistras. Out of this, on occasion, he could distill incantation. The Snake Charmer, 1907, condenses a huge popular imagery of the noble savage and the mysterious East. Its wonderful flora--the light ocher blooms like hydrangeas or brains, the green, yellow-fringed leaf spears, the oversize blue foxgloves--look forward...