Word: torpidly
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...fiery founder of Methodism, John Wesley, started out to reform the torpid Church of England of the mid-18th century; thanks to Anglican hostility, the evangelical societies he founded grew into a new and separate church. Last week a committee of Anglican and Methodist church leaders announced a plan to bring England's two great religious bodies back together...
Britain had been half waiting for the Common Market membership to galvanize its torpid economy and to bring inefficient British industries into line. Now the job had to be faced without such a spur and opportunity. To cut costs and make British goods competitive in world markets, argue government planners, the nation will have to raise its productivity, give new tax incentives to exporters, even resort to such politically risky measures as imposing tight ceilings on wage and dividend increases. Britain also lags in its capital investment rate, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling, shrewdly noting Charles de Gaulle...
Bats are not alone in being intermediate in their metabolic personalities between the poikilotherms and homotherms [i.e., cold-blooded and warm-blooded animals]; as everyone knows, certain other mammals are also able to pass the winter in a torpid state...Bears do not leave their dens for months, and eat no food during that time, since their stores of fat are ample. For a long time little was known about the body temperature of hibernating bears--and for obvious reasons. But recently R. J. Hock has liad the curiosity and the courage to crawl with rectal thermometers into the dens...
...bittersweet mood of boredom (in every scene a clock seems to be ticking) is classically Chekhovian. The actors-Alexei Batalov and lya Savvina-are at once wholly natural and wholly professional, and Director Josef Heifitz' black-and-white camera work, while academic, manages magically to evoke the torpid heat of Yalta, the snowy chill of Moscow. And nowhere in the film is there a foot of propaganda-either for home consumption or for foreign eyes...
...first, Melbourne dabbled reluctantly in politics. He much preferred books and parties. But at 51, after several torpid years in Parliament, he was brought into a Whig Cabinet as Home Secretary. He snapped out of his indolence by harshly putting down hunger riots in the south of England. "I like what is tranquil and stable,'' he announced, and achieved tranquillity by hanging several of the leaders. He scoffed at earnest middle-class reformers, once received a group of them lounging on his sofa. While they talked, he pulled a feather out of a pillow, began to blow...