Word: babel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...green-and-white-checked tablecloths are jammed so close together that the waiters can hardly squeeze between, and patrons find themselves knocking knees with their dinner companions. No matter. They have come from around the world -- Japan, Italy, France, Scandinavia, South America -- to savor this moment. The random babel of a hundred conversations suddenly turns into an excited murmur as a sandy-haired man in an open-necked white shirt and corduroy trousers saunters in and heads for an empty table. He nonchalantly opens a tattered case and removes, then hooks together, the sections of an antique clarinet. Peering through...
...proclaimed that the union would "insure Time Warner a place in the 1990s as one of a handful of global media giants." Declared the Chicago Tribune: "The deal creates a corporate dynamo." In Munich the daily newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung disagreed, predicting that the union would be a "Tower of Babel." And on Wall Street, where there had not been much excitement since the contest for RJR Nabisco, investors and speculators were agog over the proposed $9.5 billion exchange of Time shares for Warner's -- the largest stock swap ever...
...between "Jane (whom I adore)" and "Jane, whom I adore," and the difference between them both and "Jane -- whom I adore -- " marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place," in Isaac Babel's lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods...
...uncertainty. Besides, the feverish riddles of Ezekiel and the prophetic agonies of Job make better copy than the Tractatus of Spinoza. Johnson singles out the 17th century philosopher as the sort of non-Jewish Jew who sacrifices the soul of rationalism to cold logic. He quotes Soviet Writer Isaac Babel's self-mocking definition of a Jewish intellectual ("a man with spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart") and brands Marx and Freud pseudo scientists...
...efforts to explain and justify the secret U.S. sales of weapons and spare parts to Iran -- which shattered the entire foundation of the Administration's fervent public efforts to take a strong stand against terrorism -- Reagan and his aides last week seemed only to be erecting a Tower of Babel abuzz with conflicting and contradictory voices. Presidential confidants past and present got into a public squabble: former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, one of the architects of the President's Iranian policy, called the arms transfers a "mistake," and was promptly accused by Chief of Staff Donald Regan of giving...