Word: clockworks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Things didn't always go like clockwork, though. The Shanghai World Financial Center, the 101-story building that houses the hotel, launched in 1997 and promptly stalled in the Asian financial crisis. A series of restarts and halts followed. Shanghai officials also fretted over the design, which called for a large circular hole to be cut through the top of the building to relieve the force of strong winds. The feature would too much resemble the rising sun of the Japanese flag, they argued. Architect David Malott concocted a trapezoidal cutout instead, giving the building a striking resemblance...
Alternative futures call for alternative language. “1984” had Newspeak, “A Clockwork Orange” had Nadsat—each distorted, disorienting vocabulary a warning of possible ills. In “The Year of the Flood,” her most recent novel and the second in a series of three, Margaret Atwood similarly invents a dictionary for her post-apocalyptic world. But her words are amusing than ominous—the lexicon for a dystopian vision at once entertaining and insubstantial. Atwood’s way with words should come...
...dawn of the 21st century, America is, if nothing else, the land of the bargain. Big-box stores like Wal-Mart dominate the retail landscape, peddling middling goods at rock-bottom prices. Higher-end stores put their merchandise on sale like clockwork; if you wait a little longer, you can get it even cheaper at a factory outlet. Afterward, you can fill up on all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster for $15 - truly, the American Dream...
...scavengers arrive on college campuses like clockwork, in search of books, DVD players, barely worn clothes, lamps, couches and anything else that departing students didn't bother to take home. Every spring, several years' worth of accumulated goods are chucked into huge trash receptacles or placed on curbsides by harried undergrads. (See TIME's photos of the evolution of the college dorm...
...excavations of ruined business plans led him to conclude that a wise organization vigorously questions its own clever ideas; dissent is encouraged, and skepticism is built in. As luck would have it, that's precisely the kind of operation the Founders created with their slow-moving clockwork of checks and balances. But in times like these - periods of crisis and one-party rule - skepticism and dissent can seem unpatriotic, and the flawed ideas of smart people can easily get out of hand...