Word: backward
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SWITZERLAND in the middle ages had an image problem. The rest of Europe saw the Swiss as a backward, uncultured group. The only thing they seemed to be good at was slaughtering large portions of whatever nation's army happened to traverse their rocky frontiers. They were such good fighters, in fact, that in the days before chocolate and watches the confederation's main export was the mercenary armies they hired out to shore up the troops of nations that had given up trying to conquer the Swiss...
...applauded, the curtain rose on the X-29A, the experimental plane that the Air Force hopes will spawn a new generation of fighters. "That's a beautiful model," said Vice President George Bush, on hand to honor the new plane, "but they've got the wings on backward...
...unique design makes the X-29A as skittish as a colt. "It's roughly like throwing an arrow backward," says Robert Roemer, head of the X-29A project for Grumman. "No human could handle the multitude of adjustments necessary to keep this bird in stable flight." So three computers do the work for the pilot, making 40 adjustments a second to the wings and canards to keep the plane from ripping apart. In effect, the pilot guides he plane by feeding directions into the computer. If all the computers were to fail, the X-29A would self destruct...
Privately contemptuous of the Miskitos as "politically and culturally backward," in the words of a Sandinista commandante, government officials shunted aside the Indians' "councils of elders" in favor of tightly controlled Sandinista defense committees operating on orders from the capital. When a native association known as misurasata tried to raise the issue of Indian autonomy, the organization was disbanded. The misurasata leadership, headed by a young Miskito named Steadman Fagoth Müller, fled into exile and began to organize an armed resistance. Meanwhile, the Sandinistas turned on the other major pillar of Miskito society, the Moravian Church...
...reputation, and confirmed the Rumanian dominance of the event, by stepping up cold and calmly nailing a 10. She not only performed risky maneuvers flawlessly but managed to make her narrow ground seem like a stage for the Bolshoi Ballet. At one point she rolled off four consecutive backward handsprings, one more than the beam seems capable of containing and two more than any other gymnast tried. Retton's performance on the uneven bars, on the other hand, was, for her, mediocre. The judges gave her a 9.85, and the score was tied...