torpidity

• “Towards the end of the last century a certain torpidity fell upon this concept of the chemical atom.”

  Johannes Stark - Nobel Lecture

• “Chisleu -- meaning "torpidity," the state in which nature is in November, answering to this month.”

  Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible

• “And no, torpidity is not something a U-boat used to sink ships.”

  Archive 2010-03-01

• “This episode suggested that considerable losses of weight, characteristic of swallows deprived of food for a long period of time, induce torpidity and subsequent death.”

  Simon & Schuster: A Year on the Wing

• “When this idea intruded on the train of romantic visions which agitated him, it was like the sharp stroke of the harpoon, which awakens the whale from slumbering torpidity into violent action.”

  Anne of Geierstein

• “What several of these books combine to show — sometimes but not always unintentionally — is that the three years of the JFK regime were consumed by extraordinary hyperactivity on two fronts, and by extraordinary torpidity on two others.”

  Feckless Youth

• “His stolid instinctive conservatism grovels before the tyrant rule of routine, despite that turbulent and licentious independence which ever suggests revolt against the ruler: his mental torpidity, founded upon physical indolence, renders immediate action and all manner of exertion distasteful: his conscious weakness shows itself in overweening arrogance and intolerance.”

  The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night

• “The inability or refusal to reason, to seek truth and understanding, inevitably leads to intolerance and intellectual torpidity.”

  The Absence of Reason

• “He was, no doubt, preparing for his approaching fatigues; but what gigantic visions must those be that flit through the brain of such a man when his body is in a state of torpidity!”

  Sketches by Boz

• “This included a paper on cretinism and a report of experiments he had conducted in Germany on the torpidity of hamsters and hedghogs he said the cold sent them to sleep.”

  Simon & Schuster: American Connections

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