Word: wretched
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Four years ago, when she was 47, Nina Shandler turned into a red-eyed wretch, wrung out by hot flashes that banished sleep. There she was, lying in bed, soaking in her own sweat, awakened "at two-hour intervals every single night by a self-generated tropical typhoon." She knew the term hot flash but hadn't expected to encounter one this side of 50. What conventional wisdom had neglected to convey to Shandler is that long before menopause occurs and menstrual cycles cease, women in their 30s and 40s can be subject to distressing symptoms. Like adolescence in reverse...
...bork is to attack a public figure systematically (thus immortalized is the hapless Judge Robert Bork). Calculus is not only a field of mathematics but also an all-purpose reckoning ("the calculus of political appeal"). To incentivize is to encourage. The inner child is the infantile wretch that lurks within the adult psyche. Outercourse is sex without penetration. Tattered cliches like reality-based, reality check and wake-up call, alas, refuse...
Amazing grace- How sweet the sound-- That saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind...
Oliver Wendell Holmes, who knew intelligence when he saw it, judged Franklin Roosevelt "a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Born and educated as an aristocrat, F.D.R. had polio and needed a wheelchair for most of his adult life. Yet, far from becoming a self-pitying wretch, he developed an unbridled optimism that served him and the country well during the Depression and World War II--this despite, or because of, what Princeton professor Fred Greenstein calls Roosevelt's "tendency toward deviousness and duplicity...
There has always been something bracing about such creatures, especially when no whiny attempts are made to justify their malignity. The grace that redeems a wretch like Bridget Gregory (Linda Fiorentino) in The Last Seduction is her breathtaking lack of hypocrisy. She's economic woman on an intricate and divinely sociopathic rampage. She just plain wants the money she steals from her husband (Bill Pullman), who obtained it in a drug deal that she had urged on him. She just plain needs to create a new life so she can hide from his wrath. And she just plain must enlist...