Word: ata
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Across town, at the offices of the Air Transport Association, employees could see the billowing smoke erupting from the Pentagon and the phones were buzzing. Government sources warned the ATA to evacuate as well, that another plane might be headed to the nation's capital, and the airline industry's Washington eyes and ears ended up in nearby McPhearson Square, as temporarily disoriented as out of town tourists...
Diplomatic crises are a great big fun-filled piñata for a media critic. Because we, what with our anal-retentive, horn-rimmed parsing of phrases and slicing of sentences, are really semanticists when it boils down to it. And diplomacy, when it boils down to it, is mostly semantics. The present standoff between the United States and China over the downed spy plane is all about lexical boundaries - which a-words ("apology") are taboo, which r-words ("regret") are insufficient, which s-words ("sorry") are being broached. It's no accident that former Nixon speechwriter and foreign-policy...