Word: backwards
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...criminal sentencing. By making sentences indeterminate for felonies, the bill allows judges to hand down terms of anywhere between one year and life for certain crimes. Some judges are predisposed to make rulings based in part on race, poverty, or even appearance. The indeterminate sentence provisions is a step backward in criminal justice and a regression from the consensus that judges should have less, not more, discretion...
...against détente as a one-way street. It annoys me the way we tiptoe around. We're so self-conscious about our own strength. I'm for decreasing confrontation but not with us doing all the leaning over backward...
...evening Theodore Bernstein, consulting editor of the New York Times and for years its linguistic policeman, was trying to think of the term for a sentence or word that reads the same both backward and forward, as in "Madam, I'm Adam." It came to him the next morning (palindrome), and with it the inspiration for this book-a reverse dictionary that alphabetically lists an array of meanings and then retrieves the word that has momentarily disappeared into the outer fog banks of the brain...
...mooncalf? Where is poshlust? Sometimes the clue words are elusive. If one goes hunting for callipygian, he cannot look under "buttocks, rounded" or some such, but must hit "shapely buttocks" or "beautiful buttocks." ("Buttocks that are fat" yields steatopygia-which is a different matter altogether.) Bernstein's backward dictionary is a kind of combination thesaurus and crossword-puzzle dictionary. It gives only the "target" words, not their pronunciations and derivations. For moments of verbal parapraxis the deipnosophist seeking just the mot juste (ulotrichous? schlep?) may wish to keep it handy. Too frequent a reliance on the book, however...
...Common Market later refused to let Spain join. A desire by the U.S. for air and submarine bases led to a military pact in 1953 that boosted Spain's standing in the international community. It did little, however, to reform Franco's cruel and backward rule...