Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Despite the torpor of Washington's midsummer weather, the President of the U.S. reacted with vigor to last week's news. He conferred with John Foster Dulles and top military and diplomatic aides on the renewed Korean truce negotiations. In a shrewd diplomatic gesture, he offered $15 million worth of food to the people of East Germany. Then he turned to some distressed citizens of his own country...
Cambridge police, immigration officials, and a Hindu alien combined to excite 'Cliffe students out of exam period torpor with a 15-minute gun-point chase through the Annex yesterday...
Nobody professes to understand why. Disk jockeys' enthusiasm for Oh, Happy Day runs the gamut from torpor to disgust; they announce it with such words as "Here's one everybody is asking for-I don't know why." A Boston platter spinner called it "the worst record I ever heard"; one in Manhattan vowed to eat it if it ever became a hit. "Nobody seems to like it," says Cleveland's McClean, "except the people...
Arthur himself is a dreary specimen, but what happens to him is often fascinating. Novelist Bazin writes with impressive authority about the treatment of patients, the warm baths in which they are lulled, the prolonged torpor and occasional flights of excitement in which they subsist, the subtle divisions of status that arise among them, as if in mocking duplicate of the outer world...
Into this atmosphere of Democratic torpor and Republican cockiness, Harry Truman insinuated his legislative program. On the hardheaded advice of his staff he abandoned plans to appear personally before a joint session. But he sent word by his leaders that he wanted: statehood for Alaska and Hawaii; $14 billion more for defense, for a total this year of $43 billion; a $4 billion tax bill with a 75% bite on excess profits (see BUSINESS); $250 million more for the H-bomb; extension of rent control, which expires on Dec. 31, unless Congress acts; and up to $75 million to feed...