Word: torpor
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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...
...spotty. All too often his narrative poems, dealing with such subjects as a tailor's affair with a vampire and a Roman emperor's gloating over the dissection of an Eastern princess, seem more ridiculous than horrible. And his reflective poems frequently sink into a mindless musical torpor, in which occasional brilliant passages are overwhelmed by loose, undisciplined globs of language...
...grew up in Peking, where his peasant-born father was director of military training for the Imperial Chinese army. In Peking's yellow-roofed Forbidden City, Dowager Empress Tzu-hsi (also known as the "Venerable Buddha") still occupied the Dragon Throne, and China still lay in the heavy torpor of her past. While Wu was in school, Sun Yat-sen and his followers rudely yanked at the queue of Chinese tradition, dethroned the Manchus and established the Chinese Republic...
...Town. Where are the people? In 1950, it seems that the U.S. wants to live, not in a big city, but near it. All over the nation, people fleeing the city's crowds and taxes, people fleeing the country's torpor and low wages, have settled in the suburbs. The growing town of 1950 is the bedroom town...