Word: wanes
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...This year, as in previous appearances, their numbers are likely to reach into the millions to the acre. The greatest concentrations are expected in the suburbs of Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia and Cincinnati, where the days will be filled with a cacophony of ticks and buzzes that will wax and wane with the heat of the sun. A population in full song can exceed 100 decibels, roughly the level of a circular buzz saw at full throttle...
...years hence. The fact that this brood will not reappear until 2004 is one reason scientists are reluctant to put too much of their time into unlocking the cicada's secrets. As Richard Froeschner, a research entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution, points out, "Enthusiasm and curiosity tend to wane between generations...
...ability to control world events grew smaller and other countries proved increasingly independent, irritation mounted and our taste for cooperation began to wane. Our problems with OPEC, Lebanon, Iran, Libya, and even Japan dramatized the frustrations that seemed to dog us whenever we involved ourselves with foreign problems. Small wonder that the spirit of internationalism began...
...current atmosphere does seem to be part of a national retrenchment from the giddy permissiveness of the '60s and '70s. As the baby-boom generation settles into respectable middle age, many of the trends associated with it are in decline: singles bars seem to be on the wane, promiscuity is becoming a fickle memory. The sexual revolution, which celebrated polymorphous diversity, ended with cruel jolts: first herpes, then AIDS. Says Michael Novak, a social philosopher at the American Enterprise Institute: "The coming theme for the liberal society is virtue and character. In its youth liberal society could claim that...
Knowingly or not, Author Sue Miller, 42, has constructed a parable eerily in tune with the waning of the sexual revolution. The heady sleep-arounds of the 1960s, the freewheeling no-fault divorces of the '70s, have given way as the '80s wane to some sour, after-party second thoughts. Could it be that liberation has created problems as crippling as those produced by the bad old repressions...