Word: benignity
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fruit. The terrorist who telephoned the U.S. embassy in Santiago on March 2 seemed to understand that, as Alfred Hitchcock showed in The Birds, the most deep-seated fears are engendered when the benign suddenly turns menacing. The saboteur had no explosives to rig, no bomb-sniffing dogs to elude, no metal detector to foil -- only some fruit and a little poison. And that was more than enough. Just two little grapes were found to have been injected with cyanide -- not enough, it turns out, to give a toddler a stomachache -- and the country was thrown into a panic...
Last fall the mountain known in Tibet as Chomolungma, or Goddess Mother of the World, and in the West as Everest permitted itself to be climbed by 33 people, withheld permission (in the form of benign weather) from a much larger number and killed nine climbers. Are those good odds or bad? A flatlander's question, an observer decides, after asking it of Stacy Allison and Peggy Luce; to mountaineers, the answer is a shrug. The odds are the odds. Allison, a contractor and house framer from Portland, Ore., and Luce, a bicycle messenger from Seattle, members...
...Vice President, Gray made as much as $50,000 a year as chairman and a director of his family's $500 million communications company, while collecting his pay as Bush's counsel. Bush did not fire Gray, or even hold his nose. The President defended the legality and benign intent of his aide, showing the same kind of myopia toward one of his own that got Ronald Reagan in trouble. By midweek, however, Gray had resigned from the corporation and put his assets in a blind trust...
...supplier with mass-cultural fixations on things everyone knew: canned soup, Liz, dollar bills, death. Fame was the real qualifier. One doubts, somehow, that Warhol plowed through Faust before cranking out his flashy and unfelt variations on Tischbein's portrait of Goethe. No ideological motives lurk behind the benign collective visage of his innumerable Mao Zedongs; but a billion Chinese could no more be wrong about such a celebrity than 200 million Americans could be about Jackie or Marilyn...
...last week when the Spanish newsmagazine Cambio 16 named him Man of the Year: "Our best representative in a world in which Spain is in fashion." And now the 37-year-old man from La Mancha is world cinema's flavor of the month. His latest film, the relatively benign Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is a solid international hit. The comedy has earned $2.5 million in just ten weeks of limited U.S. release, and threatens to become a breakout foreign hit like La Cage aux Folles...