Word: jittering
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...work habits are abominable. He is busiest when the sky over the city is a grey suspicion of dawn, the hour when streetwalkers quit, grifters count their take, and busted junkies begin to jitter with the inside sweats. He is a loner, but his world is filled with friends. He knows the cop with the abused arches, the complaisant heiress, the slick saloon proprietor, the sick comic, the sullen stoolie who talks in the guarded whisper of cell block and exercise yard. He is furiously honest, but he can spot a rigged wheel with a sharper's skill...
...decided to buy a Geiger counter. For months he worked overtime at his job as janitor of the local high school in order to accumulate the necessary $100. The day he brought his counter home, he poked it around his backyard rock pile. Immediately, the Geiger counter began to jitter excitedly, but when Fred located the radioactive rock and dug it out, he could not remember where he had found it. For three months he retraced his steps through the hills until at last, on a Sunday afternoon, he discovered the spot where he had broken off his sample from...
Beyond the gaudy city limits the desert closes in, and beyond the funereal mountains in the distance lie the ghosts of boom towns past-Virginia City, Goldfield, Bullfrog and the others. Now & then the dice dance nervously and the windows jitter from the effects of a pre-dawn atomic blast at the AEC's test center 70 miles away. But there is no uneasiness, no sense of doom in Las Vegas even when mushroom clouds are rising beyond the horizon. Says a native Vegan: "It just couldn't happen. This is just the beginning...
When the Commerce Department reported last week that business inventories had risen $2.5 billion since last August-to a new record of $75 billion-some businessmen began to jitter. Are inventories too big? Is there danger of a break in prices that might bring on a recession...
...again fell hard. The Dow-Jones industrial average dropped five points to 270.73, a low point for the year. Down with it went the rail and utility averages. Investors sold not only because they were worried over economic adjustments which peace in Korea might bring; they also began to jitter-with little cause-that the vast outpourings of civilian goods would soon pile up big surpluses and bring cutbacks in production...