Word: tortuousness
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...frequently take mountains for granted, as the Swiss did until they realized that other Europeans would pay to climb and ski (and occasionally fall off) their peaks. Others may be terrified of heights, like the 14th century travelers who went through the Alps blindfolded, lest the horrors of the tortuous scenery drive them...
Several months later. I embarked on the most tortuous Amtrak adventure possible--a ten-hour ride to Utica, N.Y., to visit a friend at a nearby college. If you figure that the distance from Boston to Utica is about 300 miles, and that the train ride is ten hours (as opposed to five by car), it's easy to deduce that you're trucking along at the estimable rate of 30 m.p.h. Any way you cut it, the company you choose will probably begin to wear a little thin...
...service" concept. This traditional method of reimbursement for physicians has two corruptive elements. First, a physician is able to charge for each discrete service performed, and second, the charge is determined by usual and customary fees in the community. Thus physicians, following incentives, and remembering all those tortuous days (and nights) in med school, head for the most well-to-do communities like so many bloodhounds...
...Major characters who do not fit precisely into the director's polarized political scheme (notably the weak patrician liberals played by De Niro and Dominique Sanda) fade out as the film's narrative gives way to propagandistic pageant. Crucial scenes that might resolve the script's tortuous human relationships never materialize. By the time 1900 reaches its flag-wav ing Liberation Day climax, the sloganeering and confusion are almost unbearable. Even then, all is not lost: Bertolucci abruptly and wisely segues from the festivities to an epilogue, set in the present, that brings the enormous film full...
Apart from Lord Weary's Castle, a collection of tortuous, difficult poems that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1947, Lowell's books were devoted to a ceaseless self-scrutiny. The glimpses of his private world could be harrowing. "I hear/ my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,/ as if my hand were at its throat," he confessed in Skunk Hour, a famous testament to his dark inner life. It was an outwardly tempestuous life as well. He was a Roman Catholic convert in his 20s-he later renounced the church -and a conscientious objector who served...