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marginal
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  • He salvages the inferior Soviet equipment, milled from marginal steel, clumsily soldered; it's all so unsystematic.†   (source)
  • Just doing that made Pattie feel marginally better.†   (source)
  • Gogol is bored by the panelists, who keep referring to something called "marginality," as if it were some sort of medical condition.†   (source)
  • Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain.†   (source)
  • Alex turns onto Marginal Way, and my teeth clatter together as we bump over the old pitted pavement, my stomach yo-yoing every time we jolt over another pothole.†   (source)
  • "Yeah," I said, my voice only marginally steady.†   (source)
  • Because these guys were not really marksmen, were using marginal rifles pretty recklessly, but nonetheless followed the military rules for this type of assault.†   (source)
  • Either guilt or embarrassment forced me to my feet, and she mumbled her thanks and pushed in beside Jane and Guy Linda, who woke just long enough to marginally scoot over for her.†   (source)
  • The high turnover rates at fast food restaurants, the part-time nature of the jobs, and the marginal social status of the crew members have made it difficult to organize their workers.†   (source)
  • It sounded fainter now, and he was marginally aware that wasn't because Annie was moving away but because he was.†   (source)
  • His lecturer's facade gave way to a grin as he tried with marginal success to wipe the pitch off of his hands with a rag.†   (source)
  • Amy returned from a dance one February night to find him lying on her bed, naked, on top of the covers, groggy from a very marginal pill overdose.†   (source)
  • He did not know much more about it than he had learned in a routine manner in some marginal course, when he had found it difficult to believe that only thirty years before, it had been responsible for more than one hundred forty thousand deaths in France, including Paris.†   (source)
  • Accordingly, he wrote, they should resign themselves "to a somewhat marginal status."†   (source)
  • The Youth League was marginally more friendly to the Indians and the Coloureds, stating that Indians, like Africans, were oppressed, but that Indians had India, a mother country that they could look to.†   (source)
  • It's never this loud when the Commandant is in attendance, and I relax marginally, glad to avoid her.†   (source)
  • The last third would be marginal cases, those with behavioral problems and unstable families.†   (source)
  • "Marginally," he allowed.†   (source)
  • The systems projected a heads-up display (HUD) on the fighter's windshield, in effect turning night to day and making this mission profile marginally less hazardous.†   (source)
  • I told him about the project I was working on, to alter traditional methods of school instruction, and how I'd been visiting schools in ghettos and marginal parts of town, here and in Philadelphia, as a freelance associate in a behavorial research firm in Evanston, Illinois.†   (source)
  • Even though I knew my call couldn't be traced, and I'd watched Damien "accidentally" drop and then totally step on and smash his disposable phone, I only breathed marginally easier when Chera Kimiko repeated that so far the police had no leads about the identity of the terrorist group.†   (source)
  • "In and of itself, there's no immediate cause for alarm," he declared in a marginally uplifting tone.†   (source)
  • Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.†   (source)
  • I was probably the only marginally rich kid in America who hadn't.†   (source)
  • Bachelli up in the Piazza was marginally competent in obstetrics but unreliable after two in the afternoon, and his Eritrean mistress was deeply suspicious of him leaving on "house calls."†   (source)
  • Doing the cafe circuit was marginally better than the house parties.†   (source)
  • Roger, an officer I knew only marginally, was diverting traffic.†   (source)
  • After four straight days at the same table listening to endless and marginally useful testimony, they were almost numb with tedium.†   (source)
  • I own very little, make a marginal living, and I lost my youngest child to suicide when he was twenty-one.†   (source)
  • Why would you give your time to a business as marginal as Millennium?†   (source)
  • If frequently exhausted by his labors and distressed over her ailments, he appears to have come to terms with his marginal role in the order of things.†   (source)
  • This was marginally more successful.†   (source)
  • Woman was marginally better than wench, she supposed.†   (source)
  • "Marginally," Edward agreed in a flat voice.†   (source)
  • Slowly the stones in the floor stopped heaving under him, and the blinding pain abated, leaving him with a headache marginally less fierce.†   (source)
  • "I'm good," I said, throwing another paper and doing marginally better, "at learning.†   (source)
  • It was marginally less awkward when the game started again, if only because there was so much to mock.†   (source)
  • Every morning, for a month, on entering her office, she had been conscious, not of the room around her, but of the tunnels below, under the floors of the building-and she had worked, feeling as if some marginal part of her brain was computing figures, reading reports, making decisions in a rush of lifeless activity, while her living mind was inactive and still, frozen in contemplation, forbidden to move beyond the sentence: He's down there.†   (source)
  • If they could not run out someone like him, a boy who could not even control his bladder, then how could they strike fear in the hearts and minds of other marginal plebes?†   (source)
  • I almost hear their voices as I open the envelopes, the stiff new bills that rush in to us in even greater tides now that he is publicly troubled, sounding out in marginal English their love for him, their devotion.†   (source)
  • Both his upward momentum and the marginal benefit of grasping the outside of the piton provided just enough time for looping his middle finger through the piton's eye.†   (source)
  • Many of the conscripts, substitutes, and bounty men who made up an increasing proportion of both armies from 1863 on were motivated marginally if at all by ideology or patriotism.†   (source)
  • Her eyes were gritty, her tongue thick from the wine she'd indulged in to be marginally sociable with Mavis and Leonardo.†   (source)
  • He'd never been so crass as to directly ask her late husband how he managed to accumulate such large amounts of cash, but it didn't take a Rhodes scholar to deduce that Barlowe must have been doing something at least marginally illegal.†   (source)
  • I want to know whom we should kill — even those marginally arrived at — to cut our losses and get the Webbs out.†   (source)
  • But only marginally.†   (source)
  • If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man—alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other.†   (source)
  • She could not say why, exactly, but felt threatened by this absence of even the marginal try at communication latrines are known for.†   (source)
  • I knew something about Bilbo—something more, that is, than was known by the ordinary American citizen with even a marginal concern with politics and doubtless more than the editors of the New York Post.†   (source)
  • When Samuel and Liza came to the Salinas Valley all the level land was taken, the rich bottoms, the little fertile creases in the hills, the forests, but there was still marginal land to be homesteaded, and in the barren hills, to the east of what is now King City, Samuel Hamilton homesteaded.†   (source)
  • His copy of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was underlined and marginally annotated from cover to cover (also disfigured by interlinear pencil translations: "I can read Latin," he would say, "but only the nouns").†   (source)
  • When it comes to the intangible, the marginal choices, we understand each other.†   (source)
  • If Jack considered such marginal protection more important than agility, that was Jack's business— each to his own methods, as the Deacon would say.†   (source)
  • And Church, Esper 2, living on a sub-marginal diet of words for the past ten years, was starved for his own people—for the Esper world he had lost.†   (source)
  • Realizing I'd dodged something huge, I relaxed marginally.†   (source)
  • The two who were not Amanda tolerated Jimmy, but just marginally.†   (source)
  • My cognitive functions, which had been marginal before, instantly went into a nose dive.†   (source)
  • Bruce Trevor had been a marginal student but a fantastic basketball player.†   (source)
  • In all, in this one book, Adams's marginal notes and comments ran to some 12,000 words.†   (source)
  • It felt instantly, if only marginally, better.†   (source)
  • On their marginal street the West Indian Negroes were singing Saturday psalms.†   (source)
  • It's there whether you're the most pious Jew or the most marginal.†   (source)
  • "Marginally," Dr. Foster said, grinning.†   (source)
  • 'When you get it, it will be marginally capable of fighting.†   (source)
  • —with obsessive guzzling, mostly beer, which kept me marginally but not completely drunk.†   (source)
  • Like most of its rivals, Mountain Madness was a fiscally marginal enterprise and had been since its inception: in 1995 Fischer took home only about $12,000.†   (source)
  • Just then, Axe walked right by me in a kind of a daze, making only a marginal attempt at staying in the cover of the rocks Then I saw the wound, the right side of his head almost blown away.†   (source)
  • The small, secure weight of tools along his belt, the smell of intermittent rain, and the crystalline brilliance of the clouds at dusk: these are the only times when Volkheimer feels marginally whole.†   (source)
  • As I was marginally less proficient on a bicycle than I was at particle physics, this involved a lot of swearing and swerving on my part, and a lot of exasperated shouting on his.†   (source)
  • And the New York girls—although they weren't always aspiring actresses—were reputed to "do it" with even less resistance than the marginal protestations offered by the California variety.†   (source)
  • After subsisting for three months on an exceedingly marginal diet, McCandless had run up a sizable caloric deficit.†   (source)
  • He foresaw a more humanitarian and by the same token a more civilized future in which men and women would be isolated in marginal cities when they could no longer take care of themselves so that they might be spared the humiliation, suffering, and frightful loneliness of old age.†   (source)
  • The chain was "experimenting," according to a congressional investigation, using government-backed loans to open restaurants in marginal locations.†   (source)
  • Demand for resources has exceeded supply for decades in marginal geopolitical areas, hence the famines and droughts; but very soon, demand is going to exceed supply for everyone.†   (source)
  • Moushumi feels sick at the thought of it, of a death so sudden, of a woman so marginal and yet so central to her world.†   (source)
  • The once marginal, second-tier law firms started by the people who couldn't get jobs at the downtown firms ten and fifteen years earlier.†   (source)
  • With so many marginally qualified climbers flocking to Everest these days, a lot of people believe that a tragedy of this magnitude was overdue.†   (source)
  • And when they immigrated to North America, they moved into the American interior, to remote, lawless, rocky, and marginally fertile places like Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the New World the culture of honor they had created in the Old World.†   (source)
  • He'd complained about that to Student Services, and after a few tries — Student Services at Martha Graham was notoriously grumpy, staffed as it was by burnt-out TV-series actors who could not forgive the world for their plunge from marginal fame — he got himself moved to a single room.†   (source)
  • "So that you don't think that The Grave represents Republicans with even marginal objectivity, allow me to take a minute of your time—while, perhaps, the euphoria of John Kennedy's landslide election here is still high but (I hope) subsiding.†   (source)
  • The recent proliferation on the slopes of Everest of latter -day Wilsons and Dennians-marginally qualified dreamers like some of my cohorts-is a phenomenon that has provoked strong criticism.†   (source)
  • Dan Needham took a creative, often a positive view of misfortune; many faculty members in even the better secondary schools are failures-in-hiding—lazy men and women whose marginal authority can be exercised only over adolescents; but Dan was never one of these.†   (source)
  • There was a staged media event, boring because there was no violence — only balding guys with retro tattoos or white patches where they'd been taken off, and severe-looking baggyboobed women, and quite a few overweight or spindly members of marginal, earnest religious groups, in T-shirts with smileyfaced angels flying with birds or Jesus holding hands with a peasant or God Is Green on the front.†   (source)
  • Dan Needham told me that there'd been more than one heated debate in faculty meeting concerning the "marginal taste" of Owen's blanket criticism of the school; granted, it was well within a long-established tradition for Gravesend students to complain about the academy, but Owen's sarcasm suggested, to some, a total and threatening irreverence.†   (source)
  • A few reckless souls might perish trying to reach the summit without gas, but the great bulk of marginally competent climbers would be forced to turn back by their own physical limitations before they ascended high enough to get into serious trouble.†   (source)
  • "I don't want to carry the telephone," Lopsang later admitted, in part because it only worked marginally at Camp Three and it seemed even less likely to work in the colder, harsher environment of Camp Four.†   (source)
  • Because of my weak spelling I was enrolled in an extra, remedial course, which was marginally insulting, and—also because of my spelling, and my often erratic performance when I was called upon in the classroom—I was asked to see the school psychiatrist once a week.†   (source)
  • Every so often we'd hit a current and coast for a while, moving our wings in marginal fractions to take advantage of nature doing the work for us.†   (source)
  • He was a few dollarsshort of flat broke and only marginally employed at the depths of the Depression.†   (source)
  • As overall smoking rates decline, in other words, the habit is becoming concentrated among the most troubled and marginal members of society.†   (source)
  • The only serene corner had been established by peaceful West Indian Negroes, who built a marginal street with wooden houses on piles where they would sit in the doors at dusk singing melancholy hymns in their disordered gabble.†   (source)
  • I believe that to be even marginally successful in working to contain this terrible disease, I must be guided by these principles.†   (source)
  • I raised my head marginally.†   (source)
  • We made it through the first quarter of this year thanks to a marginal rise in advertising sales and the fact that two senior, highly paid employees retired.†   (source)
  • A friend of Claude's went to the medical school in Bujumbura -- the school was functioning again, marginally, Deo was told.†   (source)
  • Books thrown open, flashes of experience, marginal notations in all the hieroglyphs of emotion, more complex than the Rosetta Stone.†   (source)
  • Emma allowed that this was at least marginally peculiar, since the ability to enchant snakes was something only syndrigasti could do.†   (source)
  • Later the authorities installed microphones and speakers in front of the glass, a marginal improvement.†   (source)
  • She looks marginally relieved.†   (source)
  • In retrospect, Mr. Walters's liver function tests were marginally off, and that should have been a clue.†   (source)
  • Svensson was a talented writer, and Blomkvist confined his editing for the most part to marginal notes.†   (source)
  • At times his marginal observations nearly equaled what was printed on the page, as in Mary Wollstonecraft's French Revolution, which Adams read at least twice and with delight, since he disagreed with nearly everything she said.†   (source)
  • Years before, when she had reached one hundred forty-five years of age, she had given up the pernicious custom of keeping track of her age and she went on living in the static and marginal time of memories, in a future perfectly revealed and established, beyond the futures disturbed by the insidious snares and suppositions of her cards.†   (source)
  • Having never in his public life held an administrative position, having never played any but a marginal role in the previous administration, having never served in the military, or campaigned for a single vote, or claimed anything like a political bent, he was now chief executive and commander-in-chief.†   (source)
  • Done that way, with the Boeing gravity sensors and I/O controls and some hacked software from the Paw, it was marginally controllable.†   (source)
  • The hampered and lonely itinerant conscientiously covered up the marginal readings, and used them merely on points of construction, as he would have used a comrade or tutor who should have happened to be passing by.†   (source)
  • VII On the morning appointed for her departure Tess was awake before dawn—at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute, save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken.†   (source)
  • One moment for a marginal comment.†   (source)
  • There he found everything arranged in due order,—the accusation, examination, Morrel's petition, M. de Villefort's marginal notes.†   (source)
  • Mr. Brooke was detained by a message, but when he re-entered the library, he found Dorothea seated and already deep in one of the pamphlets which had some marginal manuscript of Mr. Casaubon's,—taking it in as eagerly as she might have taken in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a dry, hot, dreary walk.†   (source)
  • Certain marginal notes and commentaries, it is true, yielded to the intensity of the fiery test, but without detriment to the smallest syllable that had flamed from the pen of inspiration.†   (source)
  • And then it was a fine report in Latin, which the sub-monitor of Torchi carried piteously to Dom Claude with this dolorous marginal comment,—~Rixa; prima causa vinum optimum potatum~.†   (source)
  • , was carelessly listening to a man of fifty or fifty-two years of age, with gray hair, aristocratic bearing, and exceedingly gentlemanly attire, and meanwhile making a marginal note in a volume of Gryphius's rather inaccurate, but much sought-after, edition of Horace—a work which was much indebted to the sagacious observations of the philosophical monarch.†   (source)
  • ][8] [8]This is a marginal memorandum.†   (source)
  • Lockhart's Life of Napoleon (cover wanting, marginal annotations, minimising victories, aggrandising defeats of the protagonist).†   (source)
  • A Handbook of Astronomy (cover, brown leather, detached, S plates, antique letterpress long primer, author's footnotes nonpareil, marginal clues brevier, captions small pica).†   (source)
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