Word: torpor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Strife. In his oratory, Gaddafi often betrays a sort of messianic despair. "The Arabs are engulfed in torpor and darkness," he told his people last year. "The Arabs have lost direction." What he might better have said is that the so-called "Arab nation"-that congeries of 24 republics, monarchies, sheikdoms and otherwise organized anomalies-is, as usual, in a state of fratricidal strife...
...heavy users, say the doctors in the Archives of General Psychiatry, were in a "chronic intoxicated state marked by apathy and lethargy," that kept them from functioning in their normal jobs. They apparently felt no impulse toward violence or mayhem. In fact the drug induced a condition of general torpor. Another group of 115 heavy users had severe psychotic (schizophrenic) reactions; of them, only three had stuck to hash exclusively, while 112 sought to enhance their highs with multiple drugs-hashish plus alcohol, LSD (acid) or amphetamines...
...ambitious martinet, and revealed 1917 savagery in microcosm: fixed infantry moving against armed fortifications, prey to flairs and automatic weapons; military structures staffed by lawyers at the trenches and deadwood aristocrats at the drafting-table; calls to duty and service which can't quell the fears of men in torpor. Kubrick stuck so truly and unobtrusively to his debunking overview that the irony of his "brotherhood of man" finish goes overlooked. True, a fraulein warbling a love-song reduces French soldiers to tears. But we know that their captain only gives them a moment, that the decimated ranks will soon...
Every morning and evening, five days a week, commuters to San Francisco take to their cars and turn the roads leading to the city's two big bridges into fume filled alleys of torpor and noise. Last week, discarding the usual answer of building more bridges, the state's division of Bay Toll Crossings acted to attract fewer cars. As an experiment, two lanes on the Bay Bridge from Oakland were reserved for cars carrying three or more riders. Such car pools pass through its toll booths free during morning rush hours; otherwise the daily 500 fare...
...alarm fire at 56 Mt. Auburn St. shattered the dull torpor of reading period last night. The fire, which a second deputy chief of the Cambridge Fire department described as "a tremendous amount of fire," burned out most of the inside of the dilapidated condemned wooden structure...