Word: adaptive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Foreign languages do not simply acquire American terms, of course, but adapt and rework them in a sort of hybridization variously known as Franglais, Spanglish or Japlish. The Germans, who have traditionally enjoyed concocting exotic combinations like Satisfaktionsfahigkei t (the state of being socially eligible to fight a duel), now add English to German as though creating a polyglot strudel. Powerstimmung, for example, means a great mood, which can make a German ganz high or even ausgeflippt...
...fellows is compounded by a grading system that effectively ensures that everyone recevies pretty much the same marks; a recent study showed that somewhere around two-thirds of all grades were in the B range. Harvard manages only to take notice of incredible brilliance or pathetic mediocrity, and students adapt their work habits accordingly...
...spiky hair and high-top basketball shoes, and a big brother. He encouraged his bright young actors to improvise dialogue and make suggestions about the films' structures. Says Howard Deutch, who directed Hughes' screenplay of Pretty in Pink, "I've never seen a writer who is so willing to adapt his dialogue and script." (Thanks in part to urgings from his cast, a female-flesh scene was removed from The Breakfast Club.) Hughes took the youngsters to rock concerts, hosted cast dinners or simply made himself available to listen. But in this elite of young comers, it was Molly...
...longer believe that we can remake the world. Instead we adapt to it and act cautiously, because we have much more to lose. We have our careers. In the booming economy of the '60s, the affluent youth's greatest concern about a career was how to avoid one. A career was part of the System, within which success and exploitation, work and war, were inextricably linked. ("Work! Study! Get Ahead! Kill!" we used to chant at demonstrations.) Also, embarking on a career meant accepting the constraints of adulthood. I thought if I didn't settle down, I could stay young...
...individual." His dresses are unemphatic tokens of elegance, breezy bits of hotshot craftsmanship with a certain sophistication of spirit that sets him apart from most of his contemporaries. "I wouldn't want to tell people how to wear clothes," he cautions. "Clothes are like little babies. However they adapt to their environment is fine...