Word: tepidity
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...listless acceptance speech to a hall half filled with dead-weary delegates. He spoke with all the enthusiasm of a Georgia sixth-grader reciting the Emancipation Proclamation, and even his ritual invocation of New York Democratic heroes-Al Smith, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, Robert Wagner-won only tepid applause...
...Into a plastic tank the budding ichthyologist pours tepid tap water. Into the tap water he drops tiny fish eggs. Twenty minutes to two days later, pop! pop! pop! -instant fish, tastefully colored red, yellow, blue. They are an African variety, the eggs of which survive even when dried out during droughts, and hatch when the rains come. What do they eat? Instant shrimp, of course. Into a separate small tank in the aquarium goes salt water, and into the salt water goes a powder that turns into hundreds of tiny shrimps (a magnifying glass is included). By the time...
Finally last week, Peking published a summary of Premier Chou En-lai's state of the nation speech to the Congress. Chou announced that China's economy had "begun to take a turn for the better." but this tepid claim was not supported by statistics of any kind, much less by the grandiose and Utopian figures that were trumpeted to the world in 1960. Chou blamed China's food shortage on "serious natural calamities," and dwelt far more on overcoming present difficulties than on striving for future victories...
...sinks blissfully into stolen snooze. "Wake up!" squeals his darling daughter, knocking on his head with her knuckles-hard. "Ah, c'mon!" Mum squalls at the baby. "Yer not tryin'." Dad weaves toward the bathroom, battles an ancient geyser for five minutes, achieves a pathetic dribble of tepid water, starts to shave. "Breakfast!" Dad slumps groggily over his coffee. "Now don't be late, dear." Dad rises wearily, kisses his daughter goodbye. She draws back as if from a leper. "You've got bad breath!" Is it any wonder that Dad, a librarian somewhere in Wales...
Never has Michigan's tiny Kalamazoo College (enrollment: 750) so aptly embodied one Indian meaning of its namesake city: "boiling water." After 128 tepid years, Kalamazoo this fall cooked up a year-round operation that gives students, at no extra cost, a remarkable range of educational experience in the standard four years before graduation: social work in Africa, fulltime jobs in executive suites or emergency wards, mandatory study at any of three European universities, and regular work at Kalamazoo...