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One reason nerds are nerds is that parents don’t make them play sports. They wile away the hours at Dungeons and Dragons while other boys are outside playing sports. They park in front of video games, gobble potato chips and Cokes, and pretend to wreak retribution on the world. Yet for all their electronic bravado, they are fat, soft, torpid and complacent. Whose fault is that? (R. Cort Kirkwood, Blame Isn’t Sporting, The Ottawa Sun, 05/9/1999, p. C4.)…

[B]ut when, three days later, Elvis’ condition dramatically worsened and his breathing became noticeably stertorous, the worried physician had no choice but to admit him to the hospital. (Peter Guralnick, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, Little Brown [1999], p. 515.)…

When word spread through the convent, recalls one nun, “Everybody rushed to [the Mother Teresa’s] room. They were all around her, wailing and hugging the Mother’s body.” The sisters’ keening was heard by the communists, whose party headquarters are next door, and they tipped off journalists that Teresa had died. (Tim McGirk, Religion: “Our Mother Is Gone!” In a Lavish Ceremony That Mother Teresa Would Have Scorned, Calcutta and the Rest of the World Bid a Touching Farewell to an Angel of Mercy, Time International, 09/22/1997, p. 54.)

This word, when used in the above sense, can be a synonym for cry, sob or weep.…

Keynes was quite dismissive of governments and government-controlled central banks from this point of view. He argued that “it is natural, after what we have experienced, that prudent people should desiderate a standard of value which is independent of finance ministers and state banks.” (Philip Arestis, The Independence of Central Banks: A Nonconventional Perspective, Journal of Economic Issues, 03/1/1995, p. 161.)

This word. when used in the above sense, can also be a synonym for desire, yearn, wish (for) or long (for).…

Here we go again. No sooner had the Senate, despite the nearly universal predictions to the contrary, passed the campaign finance reform bill than the alarums and dirges about its fate recommenced. Tom DeLay would fight it in the House! (Elizabeth Drew, McCain’s Baby; Opposing Campaign Reform Won’t Be Easy This Time Around, The Washington Post, 05/8/2001, p. A23.)…