Word: alphabet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Within the next five or six years, many of us, if not most, will subject ourselves to an alphabet soup of similar ordeals of widely varying intensity, including the LSAT, the GMAT and the GRE. But as they return from their pilgrimages to test sites at U. Mass-Boston or MIT, most test-taking students refuse to evaluate their performance themselves. As we hail the conquering heroes, they merely say, "It's over...
...well to apologize to his legions of fans in newspaper advertisements. Luckily, neither Vaughn nor anyone else was physically hurt. But things get a little hazy after that. When the case went to trial, state police testified that Vaughn had failed several sobriety tests, stumbling over the alphabet and weaving as he walked. His defense attorney argued that Vaughn was in shock from the collision as well as under the influence of medication and the pain of his sore knee...
Roosevelt promised--and delivered--"action and action now." His New Deal was an amalgam of "alphabet" agencies (AAA, NRA, WPA, SEC, FDIC, NLRB) and work-relief projects that set the jobless to work building dams, bridges, highways and airports. Congress enacted such now hallowed (but then seemingly radical) reforms as Social Security, unemployment compensation and federal insurance of bank deposits...
After learning that placebos can range from inert pills to actual doctors, after discovering the distinctions between "disease" and "illness," "healing" and "curing," one can venture into the last half of the collection, where a veritable alphabet soup of terms lurk and psychosomatic explorations abound. Abandon all hope, ye who wrestled with the QRR and plan to enter here: inverse relations and normalized sets of data concerning placebo efficacy literally pepper the pages. Authors Donald D. Price and Howard L. Fields even include an exponential function describing the placebo effect (Feeling intensity = Desire x Expectation...
There's no solution to this problem. New Washingtonians, fresh from other parts of the country, will continue to attach status to employers whose names they recognize. How else to sort out the confusing alphabet soup of federal agencies and interest groups...