Word: torpid
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...government as it has the water it drank. Both gave off a faint but unpleasant smell, but a true Philadelphian got used to both. This year, after the exposure of graft, extortion and embezzlement in nearly every city office, the smell from City Hall became too much even for torpid Philadelphians...
Even after so many years there is no mistaking it-the voice of David Herbert Lawrence (died 1930), come back like an indignant ghost to nag the torpid flesh of Anglo-Saxons. It is not a pleasant voice: few of D. H. Lawrence's letters to his "friends" (victims would be a better word) show the genius that illuminated his fiction and poetry. It is a hectoring, querulous, spiteful voice, polite when it fears that it has aroused anger; but, once reassured by the listener's forgiveness, instantly rude and bullying again...
With a flutter of wings, the pigeons swept up & out. The dignitaries on the platform cringed and shrank away like troops before a strafing attack. Torpid delegates broke into a roar of delight. One bird landed on the rostrum, where Chairman Sam Rayburn scooped it up and flung it roofward again. Two landed on a platform fan, stayed there with the breeze ruffling their tail feathers...
Uneasy Seat. All this is such a contrast to the old, torpid, wicked days that optimists might decide that those days have gone forever. Maybe they have...
...which had collected unprecedented powers, but which could not collect its wits for leadership. The tempo of life and work has quickened. Factory managers reported that their employees were "really getting down to it." Even the Tory party, which since its crushing defeat of 1945 had been the most torpid segment of the British scene, suddenly came sufficiently alive to win an election. Just 24 hours before the votes were counted, a TIME correspondent in London had reported: "The Tories are less certain of not winning...