Word: commonness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...TIME's annual effort to evaluate the biggest news stories of the year, the common theme running through the large-type headlines of 1987 was Ronald Reagan. He was there not so much for his accomplishments as for his lack of them. "Terrible, terrible," said Nancy Reagan, herself a victim of cancer, in a year-end interview with the Washington Post. "Overall, I guess the whole year has been the roughest...
...private Nicaraguan funding "I've known what's going on there. As a matter of fact, for quite a long time now, a matter of years . . . It was my idea." The committee was unable to link Reagan to the illegal aid, but the panel's conclusions were damning: "The common ingredients of the Iran and contra policies were secrecy, deception and disdain for law. A small group of senior officials . . . destroyed official documents and lied to Cabinet officials, to the public and to elected representatives in Congress." At year's end, Reagan reverted to his policy of denying what...
...poet, a writer, a dramatist. Somehow or other, I'll be famous, and if not famous, notorious." Such heady ambitions are fairly common in the young, but the Oxford undergraduate who uttered these words in 1874 got all of his wishes, and then some. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde not only achieved the most glittering renown of his era but the most abject humiliation as well. He flew higher and fell farther than any of his contemporaries, and his life had become a legend well before his death in a shabby Paris hotel in 1900. He had wrought...
...what you will, snicker if you must, but give Hart his due: it was a great piece of political theater. Rocky, Richard Nixon, Douglas MacArthur, the metaphors of return are all part of the common heritage. So, too, are the religious themes of exile and resurrection. Hart's bumper-sticker rendition of his platform was far sharper and crisper than the rhetoric of his Democratic rivals, but what was most distinctive was the way Hart played the populist poetry of his political predicament. "This will not be like any campaign you've ever seen," Hart promised, "because I am going...
...President-elect of South Korea is a pragmatic man. As a young military officer, he wore a small brown identification tag with his name inscribed in English as NO. It was the most common pronunciation of his surname. Quickly, however, the unpropitious English meaning of no got to him. Using a less frequent but acceptable pronunciation, No Tae Woo became Roh Tae Woo. Said Roh: "N-o is negative, and I am a positive person. So I prefer R-o-h." He will need that kind of flexibility to lead his country on the still bumpy path toward democracy...