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attrition
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show 34 more with this conextual meaning
  • And right here the attrition began.†   (source)
  • Adam had attempted Sniper School once before, in 2002 when both eyes were functioning, but had failed the attritional "stalking" portion of the course (as did nearly half his class), which drove him even harder to complete the three-month course now.†   (source)
  • Ultimately it was the rude coldness of Shiva's skin, the terrible separation it delineated of the living and the dead, the disarticulation of our bound flesh, that forced me to a new understanding, a new way of seeing us in the face of such rapid attrition, and this is what I came to: Shiva and I were one being—ShivaMarion.†   (source)
  • Cedric knows such issues of racial attrition are subjects of debate on campus, and he looks intently at the professor, letting the silence hang, hoping for a break.†   (source)
  • And even if she hoped it might be, even if she hoped she might someday be persuaded by time or reason or gradual attrition not to feel this way anymore, it didn't matter.†   (source)
  • He hopes to drag out this fight, to bleed us dry through slow attrition.†   (source)
  • But China is a vast country, and despite millions of casualties, Japan's war became a debilitating war of attrition.†   (source)
  • This was a battle of attrition.†   (source)
  • Attrition ran 70 percent in early years—but those who lived were nice people.†   (source)
  • Given our rate of attrition, we hadn't much reason to take the chance of being forgiven.†   (source)
  • On that night he took to the hills and began his long patient war of attrition against the man I was in danger of becoming.†   (source)
  • Lago di Pieta was near the Tyrrhenian coast, somewhere between Naples and Rome, and had been the scene of a now ignored (in 1943 tragic) battle of attrition in a minor pocket developed during the advance on Rome.†   (source)
  • I think it was one of his major disappointments in me that I couldn't repeat myself, not a single time; for unbeknownst to Farrell, and only partly apparent to me, the McGraw-Hill syndrome of despair and attrition had set in.†   (source)
  • If the man means business, enough to devote a lifetime to it, you have only three choices: to settle, to murder, or to commit yourself to a tedious and unendable war of attrition.†   (source)
  • Attrition was their wisdom.†   (source)
  • I tell you, if you wage a war of attrition, you will lose it!†   (source)
  • According to the State Department—according to Dean Rusk— we were "winning a war of attrition."†   (source)
  • The band suffered a lot of attrition but somehow they always kept it going.†   (source)
  • Kuribayashi concluded attrition was the best he could expect.†   (source)
  • Each day was a small victory in our war of attrition.†   (source)
  • Reach the Coast every time, zero attrition rate, not a scratch on them.†   (source)
  • With this kind of attrition going on — this erosion of its former intellectual territory — Martha Graham had found itself without a very convincing package to offer.†   (source)
  • The war of attrition.†   (source)
  • Gradually, attrition thinned the ranks.†   (source)
  • At the turn of the century, well over three hundred tracks had been operating nationwide; by 1908, only twenty-five remained, and the attrition continued until World War I. In California, the center of top-class western racing, the only track that survived the ban was San Bruno's Tanforan, which barely scraped by.†   (source)
  • Some of the attrition was from casualties, deaths or injuries, and some of it was just from refusing to enter the capsule — which some did, and that was that; they weren't even chewed out; they were just motioned aside and that night they were paid off.†   (source)
  • So they ordered attrition warfare: fighting that would slow the Americans down and inflict maximum casualties.†   (source)
  • With eight companies that gave us not quite a drop each week, and then it gave us a little more than a drop each week as attrition continued, whereupon the drops got tougher — over mountains, into the arctic ice, into the Australian desert, and, before we graduated, onto the face of the Moon, where your capsule is placed only a hundred feet up and explodes as it ejects — and you have to look sharp and land with only your suit (no air, no parachute) and a bad landing can spill your air and kill you.†   (source)
  • It would be a battle of attrition on terrain that had no front lines; where the attackers were exposed and the defenders fortified; where Japanese infiltrators stalked the night; where every rock, every ditch, every open stretch of ground could conceal a burrowing, suicidal enemy.†   (source)
  • We civilized people, who would immediately fly to divorce courts and alimony and other forms of attrition in such circumstances, can afford to look with proper contempt upon the spineless cuckold.†   (source)
  • The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it—all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.†   (source)
  • Eruption, earthquake, avalanche, the attrition of glacier, the erosion of water, the cracking of frost, the weathering of rain and wind and snow— these it had eternally fought and resisted in vain, yet still it stood magnificent, frowning, battle-scarred and undefeated.†   (source)
  • But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly sharper and clearer under the attrition of thinking them over, and so he presently found himself leaning to the impression that the thing might not have been a dream, after all.†   (source)
  • Ah, he would take her beyond—beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul— Gerty's little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden entered it.†   (source)
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