Word: byword
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such worries about Gorbachev's ultimate goals involve another Leninist byword: peredyshka (breathing space). Both Lenin and Stalin were adept at justifying tactical retreats and temporary accommodations when these suited Soviet aims, only to return to the global struggle when conditions ripened. "The No. 1 question," says James Schlesinger, "is whether Gorbachev's new thinking is intended simply to achieve a respite, a pause, so that the Soviets can repair their economy; then in ten or 15 years go back to the ideological conflict...
...could hardly be described as over. At best, the deep-discount airline appeared to have bought additional, limited time in which to become a more traditional, full-service passenger carrier. That would be the very opposite of the strategy that in five years made the carrier's name a byword and irrevocably shook up the economics of U.S. flying...
...told a reporter just after his 1980 victory, "Socialism is our byword." Mugabe echoed those same sentiments after last week's electoral success. However, despite Mugabe's crude political analysis, Zimbabwe is not a socialist country now and does not seem to be heading in that direction. According to Marx, who expounded most on how socialism is achieved, this social system requires a revolution initiated by the working class. Also, economic classes do not exist after socialism is intact. Both of these attributes are missing in Zimbabwe...
Quebec has often struck outsiders as a byword for radicals and recalcitrance. The French-speaking province sends its own delegates abroad and calls its legislature the National Assembly. In 1970 a lunatic fringe agitating for Quebec's secession from Canada murdered a Cabinet minister, kidnaped a British diplomat, and set off so many explosions, both verbal and physical, that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act, Canada's equivalent of martial law. Even today the nation's most eccentric voice of disaffection, the nonsensical Rhinoceros Party, is based and enjoys its greatest following in Montreal...
...furnish his dirt-poor homeland with an international airport, a harbor and an air force. Such tragicomic aspirations and the tyrannical rule that enforces them have made Sebe's fief something of an embarrassment even to its stepmother. Said the moderate Johannesburg Star: "Ciskei has become a byword for all the worst excesses of banana republics...