Word: backward
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Solidarity trade union and the national malaise brought on by martial law in 1981 have taken a severe toll on an economy that was already creaky. Living standards have fallen below their 1975 levels, with wages averaging less than $90 a month. Technologically, the country is so backward that many farmers still plant and harvest from horse-drawn carts, while many factories run on steam-powered . machinery from the last century. Even Lech Walesa, former leader of the now outlawed Solidarity, favors basic economic reforms. "The point is not to fight against the authorities," he said last week. "We must...
...campus, he claims, innovation and creativity have been subordinated to abstruse research, cranked out to satisfy doctoral requirements or a department chairman's notions of what will advance the discipline. As one proof, the author recalls a Modern Language Association project in which 18 scholars read Tom Sawyer backward to avoid being caught up in the story while they checked how often "Aunt Polly" is written as "aunty Polly...
Since then, however, economic woes and regional strife have gradually torn the country apart. While neighboring Hungary and the Soviet Union are moving slowly ahead, Yugoslavia is stumbling backward. Some 1,000 strikes have flared since Belgrade first froze wages in February. The country is staggering beneath nearly 200% inflation, the highest in Europe, and a 15% unemployment rate that only a few European countries exceed. At the same time, Mikulic is desperately trying to finance $19 billion in hard-currency debt. "This is perhaps Yugoslavia's greatest crisis in almost 40 years," said a Western diplomat long resident...
...setting Procrustean rules and then writing freely in spite of them, none of the OuLiPo circle was more inventive and whimsical than Perec. He composed a full-length novel, La Disparition, without once using the letter e. He devised a 5,000-letter statement that read the same backward and forward. Its subject: palindromes. And four years before he died of cancer, Perec published La Vie Mode d'Emploi, a novel that French critics have increasingly hailed as a masterpiece...
...Stephen Cohen, however, called Gorbachev's performance a "major speech" that "attacked the entire mythology of Stalin." Said Cohen: "Gorbachev showed that he is absolutely defiant, but embattled. He's protecting himself because he's regarded by his critics as a zealot. But he didn't take a step backward...