Word: blot
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...nasty blot on the good name of socialism in Eastern Europe: the waiting time for purchasing a private automobile is frequently longer than a five-year plan and seldom shorter than the Berlin blockade. Only those with access to foreign currency seem to be able to drive away from a showroom with a new car minutes after walking in. For humbler folk who have the cash to spend (but precious little to buy), the wait can drag on for as long as seven years. Although the Polish government is trying hard to meet consumer needs, the fierce demand for wheels...
...proper emotional upbringing of illegitimate children. While Shakespeare doesn't wrangle over issues as pragmatic as pregnancy in this play, you wonder if he didn't have more on his mind than Julia's male disguise when he put these words in her mouth: "It is the lesser blot, modesty finds,/Women to change their shape than men their minds...
Thomas Jefferson called it "the most dangerous blot on our Constitution." In the past 200 years, more than 500 proposals have been made by Congress to reform it. Last week, for the first time in this century, a President put the weight of his office behind the notion that it should be abolished altogether. Jimmy Carter proposed that the arcane and archaic Electoral College be replaced with direct, popular-vote presidential elections. He called the change "an issue of overriding Government significance...
...tapes held under seal for 50 years, not to be disclosed unless under court order. Presumably this is meant to spare King's widow, Coretta, any further embarrassment. A Department of Justice investigation concluded that the tapes were "very probably" illegally obtained; they are thus as much a blot on Hoover's memory as on King's. Why aren't they simply destroyed? Attorney General Griffin Bell ought...
...villages they left behind. Once one of the hemisphere's most beautiful cities, the capital is now one of the most blighted. Clouds of smoke from burning garbage, tortilla shops and public bathhouses-fortified by the rarefied oxygen at 7,347 ft.-make lung congestion almost epidemic and blot out the view of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, the twin peaks between which Hernan Cortes advanced in 1519. Other urban areas-Guadalajara and Monterrey -are almost...