Word: defiant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such jokes -- delivered, as all her slings are, with a great guileless smile -- fulfill the tradition of the defiant female wit, alive with innuendo, that stretches from the Wife of Bath to Belle Barth. They also tend to obscure Midler's unique talent. Yes, she coos bedroom ballads like Long John Blues; sure, her charts tease five decades of popular music with the wink of parody. But her laser-precise technique is no counterfeit of feeling. It is the art of the Method singer, who approaches a song as an actor does his text: finding the heft of a melodic...
...tone of the speech was neither defiant nor belligerent, but the words were fraught with danger for bankers around the world. As the television camera zoomed in and a concerned nation watched, a somber Brazilian President Jose Sarney dispensed with niceties and got right to the point: "I want to announce that the country is suspending payments of interest on its foreign debt." The action was necessary, he said, to prevent Brazil from running out of money. Still, he continued, "it was not easy to make a decision of this magnitude...
...about their shortcomings. In an interim study the bishops said sanctions have not affected official policy and have punished South African blacks. Said the report: "The whole issue of economic pressures has clearly had a totally counterproductive effect on government thinking. Government attitudes have become noticeably more and more defiant, more so than when sanctions were threatened." The bishops' study also found that while blacks were willing to endure hardship to end apartheid, "if the policy is likely to produce a loss of their vitally needed jobs, most blacks prove to be tentative about pressing the issue...
...centerpiece of an imaginative, aggressive campaign to convince litterbugs that it is anti-Texan to trash. Aimed at "deliberate" litterers, 18-to-34-year-old men who are unmoved by threats or appeals to civic duty, the "Don't Mess" theme has struck a chord with Texans' sense of defiant pride during tough times. Celebrities such as Guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Fabulous Thunderbirds rock group have appeared in radio and TV spots, and the slogan is being proclaimed on bumper stickers, T shirts and even beer-can holders. Best of all, the campaign works: a research-agency survey...
From the small red brick house in the black township of Soweto that has become the headquarters for her struggle, Winnie Mandela remains defiant and determined. "The black man does not have the word reform in his vocabulary," she says. "Blacks in this country are talking about the transition of power to the majority. The government will not release Mandela because he will negotiate only on a transfer of power. The Afrikaner is very far from accepting that...