Word: vain
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...three harassed officials tried in vain to pull the traveler from the luggage rack to which he clung. At last, the carriage was uncoupled and shunted into a tunnel. There, in complete darkness, the adamantine passenger sulked and fumed. Not until the railway officials threatened to shunt his car onto a siding permanently did he finally consent to leave the train and wait for the regular 4:25 to Grantham...
After 50 hours of vain efforts to get his ship off the Goodwins, Captain Ruocco sorrowfully went ashore with his crew of 28, two German stowaways and an Alsatian pup. Later he came back to the ship, hoping to jettison the heavy lead cargo. Tide and weather thwarted him. Sturdy little Dover tugs buzzed about the Silvia Onorato, greedy for salvage. But at week's end, the insatiable Goodwins* still held their prize. Said a lifeboat man with a touch of local pride: "I think the Goodwins got her for good...
...their search for the organism that British scientists hunted in vain for 18 months (TIME, Dec. 22), Drs. Topping and Atlas first used sterile skimmed milk to wash the nose of a man just catching cold. The solution was sprayed into the noses of volunteers (inmates of the District of Columbia's Lorton Reformatory, who were paid $3 a week). They caught cold, too. Washings were then transplanted into chick embryos; solutions from the eggs produced the same thick "sinusitis-like" colds in other volunteers. All told, 57 of 60 human guinea pigs came down with colds...
...people," said Niall McPherson of Dumfries, "are accustomed to their oatmeal, and they must have it." But the pleas were in vain. Like a stiftnecked English nanny who knows what's best, the Parliament sustained the oatmeal ration...
...that "Sleepy Tom" Stewart had done any wrong. Like Tennessee's other Senator, choleric old Kenneth McKellar, he knew where Mister Crump stood on most issues and acted accordingly. When anybody, anywhere, took Mister Crump's name in vain, Tom Stewart was likely to rise up on the Senate floor to defend "the South's greatest leader...