Word: desert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...project, genteelly christened Charlotte Gardens. Proudly showing off his fully equipped three-bedroom house with its cathedral ceilings, plush carpeting and small backyard, David notes, "This is a hell of a deal compared with the hellhole we lived in before." The Riveras jumped at the chance to desert their often heatless $400-a-month rental apartment near by. They took possession of their new $47,000 home with an initial $7,500, and will pay a mortgage of $370 a month...
...jealous brute who will beat his wife and try to demolish her store? Yes-and he will plead with Lena (in the film's most affecting scene) to help him reconstruct his fantasy of a happy marriage. Does Madeleine have every right to desert the sleazy Costa? Of course-but in doing so she follows her star, at least temporarily, right out of Lena's life...
...territory rather than build a refinery on the spot, which would have generated jobs in the economically depressed region. In addition, some southerners fear that the Jonglei Canal, a huge project to divert water northward from the White Nile, will turn parts of the south into a desert...
...held the Sahel region in its arid grip for more than a decade. As nomadic herdsmen wander thousands of miles in search of food and water, some 14 million acres of potentially productive grasslands are destroyed each year by their livestock. At least 20% of the continent is desert; experts believe that the process of "desertification" could encompass 45% of Africa in 50 years if current patterns of land use are allowed to continue. Famine and pestilence plague hundreds of thousands of Africans. Livestock diseases like rinderpest, a fatal viral infection known as "the cattle plague," and human maladies like...
...practices, most governments sooner or later find euphemism an indispensable device. "Pacification" has become a popular term for war ("War is peace," as the Ministry of Truth says in Nineteen Eighty-Four), but the Romans meant much the same thing by the term Pax Romana. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace," protested an English nobleman quoted in Tacitus. Viet Nam brought us new words for the old realities: soldiers "wasted" the enemy, some "fragged" their own officers, bombers provided "close air support." Even the CIA contributed a verbal novelty: "termination with extreme prejudice...