Word: brutish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...April 30, 1942, H.M.S. Edinburgh, a 10,000-ton British cruiser outward bound from the Soviet port of Murmansk, was attacked by a Nazi U-boat and destroyers in the icy Barents Sea. The ensuing naval engagement was brutish and long: after being torpedoed by a U-boat, the Edinburgh mauled one destroyer but was again torpedoed and finally, while drifting helplessly, was sunk by another British ship. Down with the cruiser went the 55 members of her 850-man crew who had died in the fighting-and entombed with them went five tons of gold ingots, contained...
...Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909; Joseph Stalin, Soviet leader from 1929 to 1953; Adolf Hitler, an automatic club member as leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945; Mao Tse-tung, Chinese Communist leader from 1949 to 1976; and the only living honoree, Uganda's brutish, exiled Dictator Idi Amin. Seven politicians, a barbarian, a lady-in-hating and a frustrated artist. But only one woman? Says Steven Schlesinger, one of the voters: "We only selected one woman not because we're chauvinists but because few women have been in a position to cause the kind...
...seigneurial cant to romanticize work that is truly detestable and destructive to workers. But misery and drudgery are always comparative. Despite the sometimes nostalgic haze around their images, the pre-industrial peasant and the 19th century American farmer did brutish work far harder than the assembly line. The untouchable who sweeps excrement in the streets of Bombay would react with blank incomprehension to the malaise of some $17-an-hour workers on a Chrysler assembly line. The Indian, after all, has passed from "alienation" into a degradation that is almost mystical. In Nicaragua, the average 19-year-old peasant...
Conservative intellectuals are aficionados of the wink, full of rollicking good fun, by nature a sly sort. Hence, the masthead of The American Spectator contains the following witticisms: it lists a "chief saloon correspondent," and makes the contention that "Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish and Short" has been reatained as the periodical's legal counsel. And that...
Shannon--played as the stoic strong man in the Sly Stallone mold by Chris Walken--pretends he is in Zangaro to photograph birds. The ruler's men may be brutish, but they're no dummies, and Shannon gets the bejesus kicked out of him before he is deported. Back in New York, multinational enterprise knocks on his door again, this time to ask if he might not enjoy returning to Zangaro and overthrowing the government. And, of course, replacing it with a regime equally bad but tied more closely to the free world's engines of capitalist progress...