But even this law has cast a big chill over an arts community already hypercautious about spending public money.

Mr. Sununu, in being hypercautious about avoiding error, has erred.

Many Western economists trace Mr. Gorbachev's peculiar course to a hypercautious fiscal policy.

But such metaphors or exact statements of policy rarely fall from the lips of the hypercautious Mr. Greenspan.

One guidebook will remind me of a hypercautious uncle; another an infectiously enthusiastic, but not always terribly discriminating, college roommate.

Heading to Maharal's place, I shut off the Volvo's hypercautious autopilot and drove manually.

In his zeal to appear moderate, Mr. Chen rivals even the hypercautious Mr. Lien.

If it were nevertheless possible to bring a man like Sweeney back to life, only Ruttman knew about it, and Sweeney had to be hypercautious in questioning Rullman.

The original avatars of Democratic economic populism were exactly those elements of the party from which the hypercautious leadership sought to distance itself: organized labor, liberal activists and Mr. Jackson's "Rainbow coalition."

That hypercautious advice on air power from an artilleryman led to the continued humiliation of the U.N., the exposure of NATO as impotent and the abdication of U.S. leadership.

That decline has only intensified since the defeat of Robert Bork, he wrote, as a hypercautious President, fearful of a hypercritical Senate Judiciary Committee, picks candidates whose only distinction is that they have none.

Mr. Akashi, who traveled to Tokyo last spring to lobby the Japanese Parliament for its support of the Cambodian plan, had been critical of Japan's hypercautious foreign policy - its traditional unwillingness to act unless it was guaranteed "100 percent success."

By all accounts a first-rate legal mind and a hypercautious aide whose discretion frustrated reporters, he is charged with repeatedly lying to a grand jury and to the F.B.I. about his leaks to the news media in the battle over Iraq war intelligence.

To them, he was only B or Ramon or R. Garcia, the code names that the hypercautious American used during the 15 years that he is said to have provided Moscow with some of the most sensitive intelligence documents in the files of the F.B.I.

In the interior's snugly welded garage decks, with a 240-vehicle capacity, the hypercautious driver of one car had attached his steering wheel safety lock against the prospect of a thief driving it through the hull and atop the waves; on the dashboard of another car, a white cat snoozed peaceably despite the jet's roar.

While the Goldman witnesses in today's Senate hearing (with the notable exception of Fabrice Tourre) have made things harder on themselves with their hypercautious, often uninformative answers, it's also true that the senators themselves are looking for particular answers to their questions, and when they get different answers, they tend to dismiss them as obstructionist.