Word: decrepit
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...Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975). In them, García Márquez, a great admirer of William Faulkner, has created a kind of tropical Yoknapatawpha County, where "the silence was more ancient, and things were hard to see in the decrepit light." There, jungle folklore blends with Roman Catholicism, humor collides with myth, miracles kick up the dust of the commonplace. The actual and the surreal are like opposite sides of the peso: one lies directly underneath the other...
That overall rise--of three points on, the 1600-point scale--had been happily released several weeks before, prompting some educators to speculate--albeit timidly--that recent efforts at curriculum reform might finally be paying off by improving the nation's decrepit school systems...
...century town houses. The symphony and principal museum are among the world's best. Fine colleges help make the city an enormous intellectual hot tub, at once invigorating and smug. Now Boston's boosters can brag about more than old-shoe gentility: over the past decade a decrepit waterfront district has been intelligently transformed into a swank commercial and residential quarter whose centerpiece, the Faneuil Hall-Quincy Market showplace, draws natives and tourists by the millions. At the other end of downtown, $400 million is going into the big Copley Place development, which will include hotels, shops...
...that of the previous Rockys. Rocky III employs the all-too familiar techniques calculated to move the audience: Balboa suffers a setback, receives a pep-talk from coach or wife, recommits himself to his goal, pushes himself almost beyond endurance, and then triumphs. Instead of working out in a decrepit Philadelphia gym, Rocky now travels with Creed to work out in a decrepit L.A. gym. Instead of falling to the mat with his dazed opponent (as in Rockey II.) Balboa now assumes a Bjorn Borg-like thanking-the-heavens pose after victory...
...Butterfield is the first to agree that the Communist rule is a marked improvement over that of the decrepit Nationalist regime it replaced. But this apology for China's present problems, he notes quite correctly, ignores the "reality that 65 percent of China's one billion people...have been born since liberation and don't remember the bad old days...all they can remember is tumultuous political campaigns and a sluggish economy." Such an explanation is "condescending and insulting," he notes. "It suggests that China could not do as well economically as its neighbors Taiwan and South Korea, or achieve...