Word: chutzpah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unless your childhood was as magical as Mozart's, writing an extended memoir of those primal years is a risk bordering on chutzpah. Why on earth should anyone else care about the assorted teachers, neighbors and maiden aunts who were your early sources of inspiration? Such people are the private memories of the ones who knew and cherished them...
Plenty of evidence and the chutzpah...
...Prime Minister U Nu, 81. Toppled from power in 1962 by General Ne Win, who ruled Burma for the next 26 years, U Nu asserted last week, "Though I have been robbed of my power, I am still the legitimate Prime Minister." In a remarkable display of Burmese-style chutzpah, U Nu named a government and announced that general elections would be held on Oct. 9 to ratify his claim to power...
...Meese. Ed Meese was not indicted. But Mr. ((Gerard)) Indelicato in Massachusetts was indicted. So please tell me what the difference is, Governor. One was a high-ranking state education official, indicted, convicted, and on his way to prison. And here is a man standing there with all the chutzpah in the world, pointing the finger at somebody else. And I might say, to get one last political shot in here, the analogy of a fish rotting from the head down was very offensive to a lot of people in this country. And you're looking at one of them...
Weeks theorizes that U.S. prosperity and leisure time in the postwar period have resulted in a rebirth of homegrown oddballitry. He found that American eccentrics are just as humorous as their British peers, but generally kinder and less sarcastic. The Americans seemed to rely more on intuition and chutzpah than logic or rationality. Thanks to the American legacy of political rebelliousness, Weeks says, U.S.-bred eccentrics tend to hold more radical views than their better-born British brethren. "Eccentricity flourishes where there is freedom of expression," he says. "You won't find eccentrics tolerated in repressive regimes or countries where...