Word: devious
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Shared memories are the second unavoidable thread that runs through our conversations, which always start with "Remember when..." and quickly grow like kudzu to encompass anything any of us ever did in our younger years. Inevitably, the conversation ends with raucous cackles about good times or devious tricks that seem rather far away--and rather banal...
...often not the case. The disembodied voices that whisper through cyberspace can often be manufactured identities that can disguise, distort or amplify aspects of a user's personality. Fortunately, only a relative few -- Lotharios who woo indiscriminately, for example, or pederasts who prey on vulnerable children -- have a devious and potentially dangerous intent. Most Net users are more likely to project aspects of the person they wish they could be. Paulina Borsook, author of Love over the Wires, calls this ``selective lying by omission''; psychologist Kenneth Gergen, author of Saturated Self, more charitably regards it as ``playing out our other...
...labored mightily to ward them off. He did so manipulatively and obliquely -- by writing an autobiography that would appear as a biography under the name of his second wife Florence. Seymour-Smith can't quite acknowledge how characteristically -- and fascinatingly -- underhanded this step was. Things turned still more devious when Florence, after Hardy's death, reworked some passages to make his first wife Emma look more guileful and sly. What spy thriller could possibly top this for intricate ironies? Florence actually opened herself up to accusations of dishonesty for expressing her own opinions in a book published under...
...question of motive is precisely the matter troubling investigators for the FBI, who believe the mail bomb that killed Mosser was the work of a devious serial bomber who has eluded them for 16 years. Their ongoing investigation -- dubbed Unabom because the criminal's early targets were people at universities and airlines -- has drawn together a string of 15 incidents since 1978 that have killed one other person and injured 23. But while authorities can say with certainty that this latest blast bears some of the Unabomber's trademarks -- the return address on the package named a fictitious sender...
...Dude" had a devious sense of humor. In 1948, when the councillors were struggling to elect a mayor, Sullivan created a moment of levity by placing an egg in fellow councillor Hyman Pill's pocket, hoping that it would break when Pill sat down. The egg story made the pages of Life magazine...