Word: direness
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...bloodletting diminished last month, to about 180,000 layoffs--down 25% from the record set in September--it continues to make news. Last week American Express announced it was shedding more than 5,500 employees--on top of the 7,700 it cut earlier in the year. Similar dire notices came last week in industries as diverse as health insurance (Aetna), semiconductors (Applied Materials) and automotive products (Delphi). Fear of job loss is spreading among workers in retailing, which is expected to downsize sharply in 2002. Even the booming health-care sector isn't safe if the recession continues into...
...victory. Even as the Taliban's suicidal stragglers are being flushed from Kandahar and Tora Bora, some 1.4 million refugees inside Afghanistan face the double cruelty of hunger and homelessness just as winter stakes its annual claim. The situation was dire even before Sept. 11. Last winter 500 people perished from cold and hunger in the western city of Herat. Today about 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs in relief-work argot) are scattered among camps outside that city, with more returning from Iran daily. An estimated 6 million Afghans are what the World Food Program labels "food insecure"--increasingly...
That said, take the trees down already. Inappropriate as it is, the swastika comparison shows that to some people, public endorsement of a Christmas tree might be the spiral arm of something dire. And if Christmas trees are so harmless and secular, why are we bent on erecting them? To prove that Our Fun can’t be spoiled by Some Whiny Minority? Let’s find a new way to decorate, one that generates festivity and spirit instead of bad analogies. I recommend bright fabric, big jars of pasta and squashes with wigs...
...attacked after the Bush administration issued those ambiguous October warnings—no matter how they struck, or where—the administration would have been able to say it had foreseen the threat. As all interpreters of Nostradamus worth their salt know, the advantage of vague yet dire prophecy is that it may be interpreted to describe almost anything that occurs after the prophecy is issued...
Specific yet dire prophecies do not have nearly the same benefits. When California Gov. Gray Davis said two weeks ago that his state’s bridges were terrorists’ targets—and the threatened attacks didn’t materialize—pundits criticized the governor for needlessly frightening the public. Fewer such criticisms have been leveled against the Bush administration’s cautions...