1.   Her own house is like the crowded steerage compartment of a bulky ship, containing five Salvadoran families with lives too tenuous to question authority.

2.   In mid-October, their tenuous life fell apart.

3.   Like Ms. Newmaster, some of her mourners wore signs of their tenuous lives.

4.   Now, is it OK if we go try to live out our tenuous lives without thinking about it for a while?

5.   Part of it was Serb-controlled, the rest served as a tenuous life line between Sarajevo and the outside world.