Word: bluntly
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...Union was no more than an irrelevant bystander in the Middle East poker game. But since then, Moscow has anted up with a vengeance by resupplying Syria with large quantities of highly sophisticated weapons. The Soviet aim has been not merely to replace equipment lost when Syria tried to blunt Israel's invasion of Lebanon last June, but to increase Soviet influence in the region by offering the regime of Syrian President Hafez Assad more and better materiel than he had before. Moscow, moreover, has added a new dimension to its involvement in Syria by installing SA-5 missile...
...broad social issues (among previous topics: the need for professional education in the field of public sevice, the relationship between the university and government). This year's installment, one of his most challenging yet, is a sweeping indictment of the legal profession in America. Writes Bok: "The blunt, inexcusable fact is that this nation, which prides itself on efficiency and justice, has developed a legal system that is the most expensive in the world, yet cannot manage to protect the rights of most of its citizens...
...Viet Nam's northern border in early 1979, the Chinese have been giving weapons and supplies to the remaining Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Kampuchea. Hanoi, for its part, contends that its troops were sent into Kampuchea partly to end Pol Pot's killing spree and partly to blunt Chinese designs on Viet Nam. Despite Hanoi's intervention in Kampuchea, life in that beleaguered land is clearly better today than during the reign...
Master of nuance, connoisseur of transparent things, Vladimir Nabokov disliked the blunt instruments of art. "I remember with delight," he liked to say, "tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students . . ." Yet he lectured on the book at Harvard, partly because it was required reading but also because it struck some chord in the speaker. The lectures, reconstructed by Editor Fredson Bowers, disclose reasons for that resonance...
...distinct impression that his subject is not worth writing about. In the middle of a discussion of the problems posed by minimalist composer Philip Glass, he says of the subject of an earlier essay. "A composer like [Frederic] Rzewski can shift facilely from idiom to idiom because, to be blunt, nobody cares what he does, least of all the people...