Word: blip
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz -- to "fighting in a lake." A plane can reach a ship's missile range in minutes or even seconds after it first appears on a radar screen; a captain who hesitates too long while trying to identify conclusively that radar-screen blip could lose his ship and the lives of all those aboard. That almost happened in May 1987 to the frigate Stark. It was hit by two missiles launched in error by an Iraqi plane. The ship was severely damaged, 37 crewmen were killed, and Captain Glenn Brindel was pressured into retirement...
...some of the most sophisticated radar available, unable to tell an F-14 fighter from an % Airbus wide body? Crowe explained that while the system is accurate in gauging the number, range and altitude of approaching aircraft, it is "difficult" to identify the type of aircraft "from a radar blip." One reason the ship mistook the Airbus was that it was descending from an altitude of 9,000 ft. to 7,000 ft. What it was doing at that level is a mystery, according to one Pentagon official, since commercial jets flying that route normally cruise...
...sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma -- unless it be breath itself...
Meese does not rage when he hears this talk. He is watching the numbers produced by Republican Pollster Richard Wirthlin. So far the Meese issue is only a tiny blip, far below public concern about drugs and jobs. He was rumbling down Pennsylvania Avenue in his limousine last week when an aide showed him a piece of wire copy, quoting Connecticut's Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, who was traveling with Reagan on Air Force One. While saying he would wait for the McKay report before suggesting Meese should resign, Weicker snorted, "I've been battling the son of a bitch...
...thought he was more than a blip on a screen until Michigan," said Boston political consultant Michael Goldman of Jackson. "Now Democrats are getting seriously worried." Victory today would mean that Jackson may win the Democratic nomination but he would meet certain defeat in the general election, Goldman said...