Word: balloon
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SHORT STORIES ARE BEST when the background can be assumed and the foreground is fleshed out. Henry James, obsessed with inner life to a degree unhealthy for a writer using this form, allowed his short pieces to balloon into "nouvelles", because the psychological world he described in The Turn of the Screw or The Beast in the Jungle was uncharted in the 1890s. He could assume little knowledge and less sympathy on the part of his audience, and thus created his world painstakingly...
...people. I'm sure the alumni started wondering, what kind of black students are going up there? If they showed white students' beer parties on Saturday night, I'm sure they'd be worried about the calibre of white students here. But they never talk about their water balloon fights or panty raids...
Hopeful Sign. Administration aides readily concede that the proposal was merely a trial balloon. There was at least one hopeful sign. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, following Kissinger to the U.N. podium, delivered a speech so ambiguous that it left listeners puzzling over just what Moscow felt about the Secretary's Middle East aims. Pressed by newsmen on that point later, Gromyko responded with some positive-sounding negatives: "I would not say that we do not agree on everything...
...Their muzzy plot−"it must have been brewed before cocktails and executed after," as one foreign diplomat put it−was to surround the national palace in Quito and force the resignation of roly-poly President Rodriguez (known informally to his countrymen as el Bombita, or the little balloon), who has been Ecuador's benign, reformist dictator since leading a successful military coup in 1972. Setting up headquarters in a funeral parlor, the two rebel generals marshaled their forces, which consisted of 150 soldiers and six ancient U.S. Army tanks. The tanks are so old that one Ecuadorian...
...task of comprehending language. Not quite a full-fledged mystic, Percy nevertheless doubts not only the possibility, but also the ultimate worth of understanding. On the one hand he glories in the achievement, unique to the human race, of making the associative leap from the group of sounds in balloon to the real balloon; yet at the same time he views this as a self-deception and a tragedy. After all, the word balloon is not a balloon, and our confusion of the two is the cause of what he refers to variously (these essays were written at different times...