Word: deft
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Tight police security ? at times the cordons around him were four deep? kept the Pope from one of his favorite activities, working the crowds. But still he pressed the flesh with anyone he could reach, displaying a deft politician's hand that would have shamed Lyndon Johnson. The police had reason to wall off their charge: the FBI in Newark received a written warning that the Pope would be shot in Manhattan on Tuesday. The letter, purporting to come from the terrorist Puerto Rican Nationalist F.A.L.N., directed the FBI to an apartment in Elizabeth, N.J., where a submachine...
...Chicago seminary, in an address to more than 300 U.S. bishops, that he gave the most doctrinaire talk of his tour. His technique was typically deft; he quoted exactly from a pastoral letter that the bishops themselves had composed in 1976, and in effect exclaimed: How right you are! On divorce, he told the bishops: "You faced the question of the indissolubility of marriage, rightly stating, 'The covenant between a man and a woman joined in Christian marriage is as indissoluble and irrevocable as God's love for his people.' " On extramarital sex: "You rightly stated 'sexual intercourse...
Given its acknowledged toxicity, Gofman says that the crucial assumption of nuclear proponents is that we will be able to isolate radiation from the population. The industry customarily excludes its own employees from the "population by a deft act of definition. Undoubtedly injury will be concentrated among the workers handling radioactive materials--in the mines, in transport, and in the plants. But unless the workers are themselves isolated from members of the opposite sex, they will soon pass on their damaged genes to the general population--not a trivial factor, since the industry uses large numbers of people, sometimes called...
California Governor Jerry Brown has become a serious presidential contender, in part because of his engaging unpredictability as he looks for fresh approaches to old problems. First a move to the right, then one to the left, in a deft political dance that has confused and enraged his enemies and charmed and encouraged his friends. Brown now plans to announce for the presidency in late September or early October. But during a summer of discontent, of battles fought and lost, he may have miscalculated and taken one step too far to the left. The man who has stressed cutting spending...
...what really makes the picture work, beyond the expert playing of Tognazzi and Serrault and the deft construction of the plot (adapted from a classically well-built French stage farce), is the attitudes - or, rather, lack of attitudes - of all concerned. The film accepts the gays as generously as it accepts the girl's rectitudinous parents. Though the gays must make eccentric adjustments to the exigencies of living, their behavior is viewed as no more unusual than the quirks everyone develops to get through the day as pleasantly as possible. Given a little good will...