Word: cowboyed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Barbara and George Herbert Walker Bush have striking yet compatible differences. He hates to quarrel; she once liked it. She kids him about being too big for his britches, especially his style of britches. She particularly goes after the cowboy boots he sports for both day and evening wear. "They've got his initials in gold on the side -- just two of them, not four of them -- and the Lone Star State star. In color." He kids her about suspending the usual rules of conduct when it comes to her English springer spaniel, Millie. "That dog literally comes between...
...recognize successes that seemed impossible eight years ago. Reagan's four immediate predecessors presided over a frightening decline in presidential authority. Neither Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford nor Jimmy Carter could manage two full terms. Their serial failures left the presidency bordering on decrepitude. That an elderly celluloid cowboy from California unencumbered by heavy intellect, workaholism or Washington experience might halt that decline was inconceivable to the Eastern smart set. Yet Reagan not only arrested the presidency's slide, he reversed it. His high approval rating -- 64% last week, 5 points above Dwight Eisenhower's in December...
Examples of the former might be someone who wears cowboy boots in the summer time, what with the Greenhouse Affect and all, or a person who wears a beret, which is a pain in the ass, all the time, or anyone who wears a safety pin in his cheek, which is just plain painful, for any amount of time. On the same track, people who only wear light jackets in freezing weather, supposedly because they believe them-selves to be weatherproof but mostly because they are trying to be cool (both physically and mentally), are also representative of this sort...
...band, which has recently grown to seven members, also has a maverick edge that harks back to the best rowdy traditions of country. The Trinity Session contains a startling version of Lou Reed's acrid Velvet Underground tune, Sweet Jane. The Velvets were a formative influence on the Cowboy Junkies, one that is still discernible in the unpolished precision of their playing, all those drifting Svengali chords that put on the whammy and make every tune into a three-minute trance state...
...night of unsettled dreams. The sound of the Junkies is a direct and salubrious reaction to the mainstream softening of country music. "What you hear on the radio is pretty sappy," he says. "It's pop with a Southern accent." Margo Timmins, 27, sings slow and deliberate. The other Cowboy Junkies play the same way. After a while, they can sound as if they're working a gig at the funeral for the sweetheart of the rodeo. This is a band grounded in silence ("The lack of sound is as compelling as sound"), suggestion and indirection. Such stylistic focus...