A supervisor appears, and soon it's one of those stand-offs with American officialdom that escalate swiftly to "Sir, I need you to…" level.
These brief scenes escalate swiftly from a few men's taunts to an organised campaign of over-the-fence harassment to a full-blown, window-smashing, car-trampling racist riot outside the black family's modest house – unfolding in tandem with the panic of Lodge's seamy domestic disaster.
And we were lucky: the prices for Japanese art had not escalated as swiftly as those paid for other artworks".
But before the row could escalate, Johnson swiftly slapped down the advice from his own office on Tuesday morning, saying he was happy to "let a hundred flowers bloom" in terms of advisers expressing their own views.
A more neutral relationship means you can pare an argument down to a small, well-defined set of issues". Perhaps the defining word is "small". How many of us have seen what started out as a small problem escalate as swiftly as a brush fire when we deal with our neighbors.
Straker described a typical flashpoint in a school: a pupil arrives late, a member of staff tells them off, the young person reacts negatively, either arguing or walking away, and the conflict swiftly escalates, leading to detentions and then exclusions.
This story, like many of Cheever's finest, begins with a familiar, perfectly normal upper-middle-class situation — in this case, the family-man protagonist Johnny Hake is broke and feels the pinch — and swiftly escalates it, without pause or comment, to a series of absurd, dangerous, and desperate decisions.
It does not take long for Mrs Bush to become the subject of a barrage of vile notes, each laden with clumsy, childish attempts at sexual innuendo, like "Mrs Bush has a Bush!!!" and "Mrs Bush is shaved!!!!", which swiftly escalates to "Mrs Bush gives blowjobs to Mr Fisher" and "Mrs Bush wants sex all the time, in her bush" – pretty shocking stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.
– swiftly escalated into an exchange of insults – Her: "You're hopeless.
Quite apart from issues of maritime safety, a minor incident could swiftly escalate into military conflict.
