Word: abyss
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nudge the South African government toward racial reform, have produced few results. Initially, National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane urged South Africans to seize upon the vague hints of future reforms in Botha's Durban speech. He suggested that "those leaders on both sides who are looking into the abyss of massive violence" should "challenge this government, ask them to put their money where their mouth is." But later, White House Spokesman Larry Speakes took the unusual step of publicly asking Botha to "clarify" his intentions, adding that "there is a crisis of confidence in South Africa...
...galactic material swirls into the abyss, it forms a giant disk around the black hole, heats up and begins radiating energy. It is probably this so- called accretion disk that the astronomers measured. Nonetheless, to prove that Sgr A* is indeed a black hole, scientists must conclusively determine its mass. Then, knowing its size, they will be able to calculate its density. Says Lo: "When you find that the density is extremely high and the gravity is so strong that it will overcome all known mechanisms of pressure support, then that would be proof that there is a gravitationally collapsed...
...Bogdanovich drenches the tragic life story of facially disfigured outcast Rocky Dennis with more sugar than the family size package of Cocoa Crispies, making John Hurt's Elephant Man look like the Wild Coyote by comparison. Climcal direction and Monday Night at the Movies screenwriting damn Mask into an abyss of sloppiness and unprofessionalism from which it is redeemed only by Eric Stoltz's tour-deforce in the title role and superb performances by Cher as Rocky's wackedout but tenderhearted Mom and Sam Elliott as her off-again, on-again biker boyfriend...
...rejected Night. "The Holocaust was not something people wanted to know about in those days," the author remembers. "The diary of Anne Frank was about as far as anyone wanted to venture into the dark." Night, finally published in the U.S. in 1960, drew them far deeper, into an abyss that was appalling to contemplate and impossible to ignore. It was as if a thousand tongues had suddenly become unstuck...
...meeting with Shultz, Gromyko has continued to heap contempt on the defensive rationale for Star Wars. Mixing his metaphors a bit, he has said that if the U.S. persists with the program, the world will end up "under a Sword of Damocles" and "on a tightrope over the abyss...