Word: bugaboo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Java, the universal programming language owned by Sun Microsystems, has long been Microsoft's biggest bugaboo. Gates said in a private e-mail that its potential to make Microsoft obsolete "scares the hell out of me." If Java should capture the hearts and minds of programmers, computers could one day run without the need for an expensive operating system like Windows. To head off that threat, Microsoft licensed Java from Sun in 1995 and used it to create its own "polluted"--or incompatible--version, which discouraged software developers from using the original Sun program. Sun cried breach of contract...
However nightmarish and improbable, this Wall Street bugaboo has been popping up with increasing frequency as the Asian crisis drags on. It's not difficult to see why: Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto and officials of his Liberal Democratic Party have publicly broached the sale of T-bills, suggesting the proceeds could be deposited in hard-pressed Japanese banks...
...earth. From the mid-1970s on, there has been an increasing disengagement of people from government, politics, community and, in some ways, from themselves; moreover, this disengagement has been actively sought. Not all that long ago, alienation from self and others was so universally thought to be the bugaboo of modern life that it was becoming boring to mention it. To be emotionally numb to experience, to live depersonalized, was to be unhappy. Not lately. With the notable exception of religious fundamentalism, the past 25 years have seen an aggressive pursuit of depersonalization, a shutting off of the emotions...
Being censored is a high privilege for any American writer, and we experience it approximately zero times in our career. Our great bugaboo is not censorship; it's getting remaindered, seeing our brave writing stacked on the bookstore floor, marked down to $1.89--and nobody buying it at that price either. Writers of today know that the nobility bestowed on Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence will never be ours, that nobody bothers with repression anymore because everyone knows that to crack down on an artist is to promote him. Even Jesse Helms, not the swiftest intellect in the U.S. Senate...
...bugaboo on education," said Boswell, an army pilot during Vietnam and a longtime farmer. "It's the great equalizer. I agree we need to balance the budget, but not at the expense of education...