Word: aura
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...twinkling stars. In the clearing of a forest that Bambi and Thumper might have been pleased to call home, a spaceship sits - not a high-tech marvel of the NASA future but a bell-shaped spinster of a ship, with old-fashioned street lamps appending and the unmistakable aura of Captain Nemo's Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A misty crescent moon gives glimpses of child-size figures moving about in capes and cowls on a field expedition for earth flora. One of these figures wanders off and encounters the threatening glare of headlights...
...tone. "The new edition exhibits my interests," she says. "It was bound to." One result of this approach is a large supply of environmental words (recycling, renewable energy sources, greenhouse effect); another is a special sensitivity toward racial terms. "Some epithets I left out because inclusion gives them an aura of respectability," she says...
...actions, and vowed to support Britain at all costs, the military junta might now display a great deal more willingness to return the islands to their previous status and resolve the issues of sovereignty and administration of the Falklands by negotiation, not war fleets. Our neutrality has conferred an aura of legitimacy to Argentina's claim to the islands, and has bolstered its appetite for defending them by force...
Baker's political savvy is disguised by the disarming aura he creates with his self-deprecating wit. He tells of talking with Paul Volcker about towering interest rates and realizing that they might not seem so high to the 6-ft. 7-in. chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The solution, puckishly suggested Baker (who stands all of 5 ft. 7 in.), is to have shorter men in important positions. His humor helps him to avoid the arrogance that tends to accompany power. He is genuinely well liked, by Democrats as well as Republicans. "When you see him coming...
Physics, too, seems capricious. Like mathematicians, Jakob notes, the physicists assume at whim and derive the consequences. Classical physics, at least, seemed more commonsensical; it had an other-worldly quality that lent its explanations an almost spiritual legitimacy. Equations alone lacked this aura. Classical physics' beauty, to Jakob, sprang from this peculiar marriage of the physical and the mystical...