Word: cumbrous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...voluble and protected community of strivers, where competition was prized and turned into social contribution. Brookline, embedded in Boston, has always considered itself better than Boston. A Revolutionary village, it had become so affluent in the 19th century that it was the first suburb in America to resist the cumbrous embraces of a major metropolis. The defiant localness and privacy remain, along with a communal apartness and vigilant self-government. The Brookline Citizen is aptly named. The '50s sense of asocial privacy never reached the inmost core of Brookline...
...Justice Department officials, Meese's announcement was something of an anticlimax. As soon as the Attorney General's name began to crop up in the Wedtech scandal 15 months ago, cries for Meese's resignation were as regular as congressional quorum calls. During the ensuing months, Meese became a cumbrous liability for the presidential campaign of George Bush and a living symbol of what Democrats like to call the "sleaze factor...
Pick up an old novel by one of the Russian masters or a new memoir by a Soviet dissident and notice how people introduce themselves -- last names first. "Good day, I am Scriabin, Alexander Nikolayevich." Notice too how often, perhaps in rebellion against those cumbrous Russian patronymics, they use only their initials. "Good day, I am Scriabin, A.N." The title of a French movie made a few years back, Lacombe, Lucien, was apparently intended to show how the German Occupation had bureaucratized and dehumanized the susceptible French. But the Russians do not have their reversed names imposed on them; they...