Word: argot
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...face the double cruelty of hunger and homelessness just as winter stakes its annual claim. The situation was dire even before Sept. 11. Last winter 500 people perished from cold and hunger in the western city of Herat. Today about 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs in relief-work argot) are scattered among camps outside that city, with more returning from Iran daily. An estimated 6 million Afghans are what the World Food Program labels "food insecure"--increasingly vulnerable to malnutrition and disease. "We're seeing the cumulative effects of years of suffering," says U.N. officer Stephanie Bunker in Islamabad...
...image is Signac's wonderful and bizarre Portrait of Felix Feneon, Opus 217, 1890-91--the fox-jawed face with its little tuft of beard in profile, the hand holding a cyclamen, against a madly spiraling background of fruit-jelly abstract forms. The dandified, loony energy of Feneon's argot-filled writing seems impacted into that background, even though its source is a Japanese kimono pattern. My, you think, those guys must have had some laughs together. Which they...
...with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda) has taken on another grim reconstruction: a 27-year-old murder. No car-chase thrills here, merely the gathering of string, knotted together to lasso the perpetrator, who is the guy everyone thought it was all along. Gourevitch is more interested in context, argot and character than plot. The book is the better...
...Sakhalin is where change will begin. Once a czarist penal colony, then little more than a Soviet air base, Sakhalin is now home to the largest foreign investment projects in Russia. These deals, totaling some $26 billion, are long-term oil and gas Production Sharing Agreements--PSAs, in the argot of the oilmen--that offer the legal framework that Western companies require if they are to make major capital outlays in developing Russia's oil, gas and mineral deposits. The deals grant foreign companies export rights and tax breaks, while Russia gets a share of the petroleum flow...
...last night of the concert. There is something wrong with the plane - a part has gone wrong, so they're going to try to fix the part (which could take three hours) or order the part (which could take two days). I decide that, in airline speak, the same argot which calls a muffin a breakfast and a strip of rotten chicken an entree, three hours means nine hours and "could take two days" means the plane is going down in a fiery ball of flame. I rebook my trip through Miami and figure I'll take my chances getting...