Word: pile
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Almost every Monday, Mahon and several mothers stake out a small brick bungalow across the street from Holy Name Catholic Church, where about 180 families wait in line for bags of food. Babies chugging from bottles lounge in shopping carts, while toddlers diligently pile pebbles in the driveway. Mothers and a few fathers stand stoically in the warm sun, their blank stares reflecting hunger, poverty and fatigue. Yet their ennui dissolves in the face of the Madres' perky compassion...
...Rumanian-made Dacia sedans are lurching every which way, horns honking. On the sidewalk, pedestrians slog through ankle-deep mud and slush past an armored personnel carrier, guarded by shivering young soldiers fingering the triggers of their Kalishnikov rifles. At a kiosk nearby, 50 customers jostle for the meager pile of Romania Libera newspapers. Two doors away, a line of more than 100 shoppers shuffles toward a butcher's counter offering only hamburger. "One hour, maybe two, to wait," says a housewife bundled into a shabby parka. "That is, if any is left...
...even the most miraculous of new technologies brings with it some problems. Fax-addicts claim that with a fax, you can be sure that your document has been received. But some users complain that, like dirty laundry, faxes can pile...
...insist and insist again, by Vague Generalities. We abhor V.G.'s, we skim right past them, we start wondering what kind of C to give from the first V.G. we encounter; and as they pile up, we decide C-(Harvard being Harvard, one does not give D's. Consider C- a failure). Why? Not because they are a sign the student does not know the material, or hasn't thought creatively, or any of that folly. They simply make tedious reading. "Locke is a transitional figure." "The whole thing boils down to human rights." Now I ask you, I have...
Artful equivocations are even worse; lynx-eyed sly little rascals that we are, we see right through them. (Up to exam 40. Then our lynz eyes droop, and grading habits relax. Try to get on the bottom of the pile.) Again, it is not that A.E.'s are vicious or ludicrous as such; but in quantity they become sheer madness. Or induce it. "The 20th century has never recovered from the effects of Marx and Freud" (V.G.); "but whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is difficult to say." (A.E.) Now one such might be droll enough...