Word: decayed
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...likely that either Washington's or Massillon's victims had ptomaine poisoning. Ptomaines (from ptoma, a corpse) are basic chemical substances derived from the decay of animal or vegetable proteins. They appear in food substances only in the later stages of putrefaction. True ptomaine poisoning is almost unknown. The use of the term is a survival of the period when physicians believed that bacteria produced their injurious effects by means of basic alkaloid-like products. Now it is known that the bacteria themselves cause the trouble...
...society in which people ate to live, lived to drink and drank to forget living. In the first flush of their romance Vondorn takes up drinking again, and with that his tale is as good as told. How he and Juno run off to live and decay together in a hut in the desert, how Vondorn slaves at his book, how he visits the nearby Beldoro Observatory, prepares to take up residence with Juno there, is only the long prelude to the ultimate cough that wafts him to sleep under death's starless coverlid...
...middle of his middle-aged decay Miltiades looks about Florence for some foothold to begin his climb. A drunken confession on the part of T. Handback, the town's wealthy merchant, gives him his chance. Years ago Handback had cheated Miltiades of his small fortune in cotton ; now, when the Colonel learns that the highly respectable Handback keeps a quadroon mistress, Gracie Vaiden, one of the old Vaiden slaves, he uses the information to pry himself, as a clerk at $7.50 a week, into Handback's store. Straight way he makes friends with the Negroes and poor whites, by selling...
Tales of treasure-hunting, of Tomacito, a New Mexican Thumbling, of drunken burros, spice the book. More sombre are the tales of disappearing Amerindian tribes and customs, but they are stoically told. The Zia Indians, in their decay, became so poverty-stricken, so skinny, that other Indians called them the "hungry ones." The "hungry ones" called back: "Fat Indians dance slowly...
Reave Thurso, with his mother and lamed brother Mark, lives on the coastal farm left by his father who killed himself when he could not make it pay. His limestone quarry buildings lie in decay; only a rusty cable, stretched across the canyon over the farm, hums in the air in memory...