Word: answering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just exactly what our equivocator's answer has to do with the original question is hard to say. The equivocator writes an essay about the point, but never on it. Consequently, the grader often mentally assumes that the right answer is known by the equivocator and marks the essay as an extension of the point rather than a complete irrelevance. The artful equivocation must imply the writer knows the right answer, but it must never get definite enough to eliminate any possibilities...
Some questions are so fraught with political ambiguity that a criminal trial cannot answer them completely. One such conundrum: Who should be held accountable for the Iran-contra affair? Last week a jury in Washington rendered a judgment on retired Marine Lieut. Colonel Oliver North. But it was a verdict equivocal enough for both the defendant and the prosecutor to hail it. North proclaimed a "partial vindication" because he was found not guilty of nine felony charges. Prosecutor John W. Keker asserted that North's convictions on three other counts demonstrated "the principle that no man is above...
...window at the Madison Avenue traffic below. Then, whippet-like, she whirls to confront the semicircle of editors at her morning story conference. "What's the word we want?" she asks. Through owlish goggles she scrutinizes their faces, as if seeing them for the first time. Before anyone can answer, she darts to her chair and provocatively settles her slender black-stockinged legs on a cluttered coffee table. She sits stiffly, ladylike. Her expressive hands, with their buffed, not polished nails, beat the air. "Older women of our generation have been described as depressed, sad, menopausal, decrepit, unproductive," she blurts...
...airlines of rigging their systems so that their flight information received more display- screen prominence than competitors' flights. Richard Murray, who heads Texas Air's reservation network, has been urging the Government to force the major carriers to spin off their reservation systems. Says he: "The only answer is divestiture, because they will always find ways to use the systems as weapons to ground competition...
...Baltimore the physicists proclaimed their answer: no way. After weeks of thorough experimentation, researchers from numerous prestigious institutions, including M.I.T., Caltech, Yale and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reported that they had found no evidence of "cold" fusion. The scientists seemed incensed that they had wasted their time trying to replicate an error-filled experiment and chided the University of Utah for requesting a $25 million federal grant based on sloppy research. Said Caltech physicist Steven Koonin: "We are suffering from the incompetence and perhaps the delusions of Professors Pons and Fleischmann." When the nine members of the cold-fusion review...