Word: acronymically
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Belfast, and I've been to New Haven, and there's about ten million times more romance and mystery about the former. The average citizen's chance of being shot is better in New Haven. Belfast has one of the lowest O.D.C. rates in Western Europe (O.D.C. being an acronym for "ordinary, decent crime," as distinguished from political violence by the people here). Assuming you're not out on the streets draped in a Union Jack or the Irish tri-colors, or running guns for the IRA, the average American tourist is probably about as safe here as anywhere else...
...Acronym for the fast-food bakery Au Bon Pain, where croissants, chess enthusiasts and tourists abound just beyond the Yard's wrought-iron gates...
...brass are worried that the Serbs have moved hundreds of SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles toward Albania, lurking in the valleys the Apaches would follow into Kosovo, just waiting for the gunships to cross the frontier. "The Apaches are MANPADs magnets," an Army officer says, referring to the acronym for Man-Portable Air Defense System, used for the small-missile launchers. "We keep asking the Army," a Joint Staff officer says, "how many Apaches they think are going to come back." That's why the helicopters--initially heralded as saviors--still sit at their Albanian base, twiddling their rotor blades...
...what's not to like about Jeff Gordon? "He kind of looks gay," says Doris O'Bryant while selling $10 Fans Against Gordon T shirts outside the Talladega racetrack. The acronym is like something of an inside joke, and one suspects the wink it produces leads to an inevitable flatulence joke...
Things like this happen enough that the military has an acronym--SNAFU, for "situation normal, all fouled up"--to use in polite company for such errors. "This is the first time I have been aware of where there were inadvertent, unintended casualties because of a target mistake at the wrong facility," a U.S. intelligence official said last week, using synonyms for SNAFU four times in a single sentence...