Word: blunt
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DIED. Donald Maclean, 69, British diplomat who with his fellow Cambridge graduate Guy Burgess was at the center of Britain's most infamous spy scandal in the past half-century; of cancer; in Moscow. Recruited at college in the 1930s with his lover Burgess by Anthony Blunt, then a don, Maclean was a mole in the British embassy in Washington, where he had access to highly classified Allied documents, including U.S. atomic secrets. Tipped by another Soviet mole that they were suspected of spying, Maclean and Burgess escaped from England to the U.S.S.R. in 1951. "My God, Maclean knew...
...escaped with the help of a piece of pipe. Their friend and co-worker, William Turks, whose arm was in a cast, was not so lucky. The whites dragged him from the car, and killed him with what was officially described as "overlapping blows to the head by a blunt object like a stick or rod, or even a foot...
...disastrous effect such an agreement would have on the Lebanese economy. As the Lebanese Foreign Minister put it, "this country could not endanger its trading relationship with 22 Arab states for the sake of a single one with Israel." (Rebecca Trounson, Boston Globe, March 13). Israel's response was blunt with chief negotiator David Kimche reportedly saying "there was no reason to continue negotiations if the Lebanese insisted on a closed border." (Trounson, Boston Globe, March...
...metaphors and other wordplay, Safire at his giddiest can let his love of sound undermine his efforts to make sense. An example: "Thus one who lobbies expertly for the rights of female derelicts might be called a shopping-bag-lady knifethrower." He is usually most effective when simplest, writing blunt, mock-macho prose. Recounting in January the confession of a former Communist "mole," American Aristocrat Michael Straight, Safire cracked, "How delicious it must have been for a Red under the bed to deride Joe McCarthy for looking for Reds under the bed." In a column labeled "The Midterm Crisis," Safire...
...time between failures was a shockingly low 1.2 hours. The complex automatic testing circuits now being used in tanks and planes were supposed to be more than 95% reliable. They turn out to be less than 60% reliable. A review by the Defense Science Board in 1981 is blunt in its criticism of such built-in electronic testing devices: "While these promises looked good on paper and were incorporated into almost all specifications, the actual field performance has been nothing short of a disaster...