Word: beset
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stop exploring new ideas and thoughts, even some of the most outlandish ones. If we had stopped in days of old and said majestically, "We know it all." life wouldn't be so much fun. The world would still be flat, the seas beset by monsters, and the moon would still be cheese...
...MANHATTAN a bus ride can transport you through different worlds. There are no actual boundaries, but each section of town has its own culture. Of all the neighborhoods, Harlem can often treat its inhabitants the hardest. Ceremonies in Dark Old Men is a vignette about a Harlem family beset by the frustrations of being black in the city...
...popularity, and she and the Congress Party won overwhelmingly in Uttar Pradesh. Though she is still respected there, the state government has been shoddy and corrupt and as feudalistic as the ancient Moslem regimes that were displaced by the British. Indeed, in the past year the state has been beset by a provincial-police mutiny, widespread rioting and looting prompted by food shortages, soaring inflation, power failures, unemployment, vicious black markets and bureaucratic incompetence. As a result, Mrs. Gandhi was reluctantly forced to fire her hand-picked state government and dissolve the leg islature last June. To ensure victory...
Barter supposedly is a primitive form of commercial exchange that became outmoded centuries ago with the appearance of money. But in the U.S., barter is suddenly coming back strong. Beset by shortages of many basic raw materials and finished goods, purchasing agents for the most modern corporations are turning into sultans of swap: they obtain scarce products that their companies need by offering goods that are in equally short supply...
That faith is nowhere more evident than in the U.S.S.R., which has been beset in recent years with controversial sensitives. One, Ninel Kulagina, was appraised as capable of causing objects to float in midair. As Martin Gardner notes, "She is a pretty, plump, dark-eyed little charlatan who took the stage name of Ninel because it is Lenin spelled backward. She is no more a sensitive than Kreskin, and like that amiable American television humbug, she is basically show biz." Indeed, Ninel has been caught cheating more than once by Soviet Establishment scientists...