Word: direness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...House cannot pick itself up out of this shambles and speedily vote some sort of responsible budget plan in the next few weeks, the economic outlook will be dire. A group of six former Cabinet officers (including five Secretaries of the Treasury who had served in Democratic and Republican Administrations going back to 1961) warned early last week that "the huge budget deficits now in prospect . . . could lead to years of financial turbulence and industrial stagnation." The group, assembled by Peter G. Peterson, who was Secretary of Commerce in the Nixon Administration, proposed a one-year freeze on Social Security...
...movie. On the plot level, Poltergeist is a warning against trying to build a mobile modern life over the . unquiet graves of the past. The picture can also be seen as a sly comedy supporting the proposition that violence on TV-or, more precisely, in it-can have a dire influence on children who watch it. (Spielberg calls Poltergeist "my revenge on TV.") Whichever, when the demons escape the TV set, careering around the room like puffs from a deranged steam engine, the little girl turns to her parents and blithely announces: "They're here!" Right inside the mind...
...teacher's third dirty look: "One more problem from you, junior, and it's out the door." Short of requiring withdrawal, the College can do nasty things like kick people off of sports teams and force their by-lines out of undergraduate publication. On paper it all sounds rather dire, but who can take the administrators seriously when they're threatening to boot one out of every nine people in a single class? More importantly, are students going to learn anything about computers as a result of all this excitement...
...Angels have expanded to more than 2000 members who walk the streets and ride the mass transit unarmed in 33 cities. Facing what The New York Times has called "chilly indifference to outright opposition" from the police, the Angels have not yet been accused of any of the dire misdeeds that liberals fear and police apparently would love to reveal. The Angels--at least so far--obey the law. And though it is difficult to prove, they seem to deter crime and make the citizens around them feel safer...
...victim not so much of calculation as of a failure to calculate. He appeals before he appalls. He really cannot see, until the end of the story, the difference between the Nazis and everyone else with whom he has leagued himself to get ahead, cannot imagine the dire consequences of ambition unmediated by, among other factors, simple common sense...