Word: aptness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...should he have gone to North Africa, a part of the world that Frenchmen in 1912 were still apt to generalize as "the Orient"? There were two basic reasons: cultural curiosity and the search for light...
...quick enough to calculate "postpone" in reverse have you any chance of showing up on time. Above all, as English has become a kind of prized commodity -- and a status symbol -- in many corners of the world, those of us born in possession of it are apt to feel as vulnerable as a bejeweled dowager in a dark back alleyway. There's always someone waiting to jump out and mug us with his English -- before we can try out our Bahasa Indonesia...
...Mayor Feinstein prided herself on being a hands-on administrator, often to the distress of other officials. When a foul-up occurred, she was apt to respond with a blistering dressing down or at times even a bout of temper behind closed doors. Once she summoned police chief Cornelius Murphy to her office posthaste...
...part of a post-cold war reordering of national priorities, a broadening of the definition of national security is apt. But so is at least a passing doubt about extending a frame of mind that in the past has not always aroused the nation's noblest instincts -- as the derivative term security risk can chillingly remind those who were around in the late '40s and the '50s. Do we really want cold war-type anxieties and constitutional indelicacies to be applied in nonmilitary realms -- in the environmental area, for instance, where restraints might be far more intrusive than military protectiveness...
There are times when Healy has something on his mind that cannot be shared by either teaching or example. Then he is apt to write a column for his old friend Meg Greenfield, editorial-page editor of the Washington Post. Recently he wrote a wise, forbearing essay on the troubles of Washington Mayor Marion Barry, concluding with Donne's words, "Thou knowest this man's fall, thou knowest not his wrastling...