Word: awkwardness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...really good idea to have an orientation period. Of course, the generic questions--what's your name, where are you from, what classes are you taking--are awkward, but it's a way to meet people. You meet someone totally different, you have nothing in background common to them and it gives you something...
...invincibility, in his political instincts and in the irresolution of his antagonists. Having easily conquered Austria, he decided in the spring of 1938 to attack Czechoslovakia. Like Poland, Czechoslovakia had been carved out of the Habsburg Empire by the mapmakers at Versailles, and its boundaries included an awkward mixture of roughly 6.5 million Czechs, 3.3 million Germans, 2.5 million Slovaks and about 800,000 Hungarians and Poles. Unlike Poland, it was a genuine democracy with a large and well-equipped army; it also had signed a treaty that pledged France to defend it against any attack...
Other artists in the show use the real world as raw material. Charred, rough-edged and yellowed, Shinro Ohtake's mixed-media assemblages and collage- filled scrapbooks seek an awkward beauty in combinations of found objects and unwanted rubbish. Such pieces as his Family Tree, 1986-88, serve as vivid symbols of the appropriationist free-for-all that is Japanese pop culture today -- a tsunami of Mickey Mouse trinkets, teriyaki burgers, Picasso calendars, Swatches and more. They are also dispassionate records of life in what Ohtake calls an "information supermarket," an environment in which traditional Japanese cultural values...
...translation has been startling. Essentially, the translating machine analyzes the syntax of an English sentence, determining its grammatical structure and identifying, for example, the subject, verb, objects and modifiers. Then the words are translated by an English-Japanese dictionary. Next, another part of the computer program analyzes the resulting awkward jumble of words and meanings, and generates an intelligible sentence based on the rules of Japanese syntax and the machine's understanding of what the original English sentence meant...
...from half-a-dozen top dramatists. Structurally, Sherman's show is two one-acts, but they are linked by one of the cleverest devices in memory. The first piece, A Table for a King, is an exquisitely painful tale of betrayals involving a pathetically dignified Mississippi matron, a sweetly awkward American college boy recovering from a thwarted homosexual infatuation, a casually seductive waiter and the sly, implacable owner of a Greek-island hotel where all the characters are living...