Word: distinguishing
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Children are born anarchists. Babies reign in the solitary kingdom of ego, unable to distinguish the "I wanna" of whim from the "I gotta" of need. In an age of instant gratification and infant attention span, the popular arts have played to this childish impulse. Heavy-metal rock beats out its primal demands like a child pulling a high-chair tantrum. TV is the baby-sitter of a spoiled kid's dreams: it promises everything, never says no and lets you change the channel if you don't get what you want. And many movies these days are less adolescent...
...Computers can direct the simultaneous firing of missiles and other weapons over enormous distances at every form of threat. Aegis radar can supposedly spot a basketball at 150 miles and a high-altitude aircraft at more than 1,000 miles. One thing Aegis radar cannot do, however, is reliably distinguish the size and shape of an aircraft. Sideways, a longer plane might give off two blips to a shorter plane's one. But head-on, Aegis radar cannot tell an Airbus from an F-14. No radar can, the Pentagon insists...
...influence can be seen in works by Anglo artists who find inspiration in the Hispanic tradition or who see it as a way of giving freshness to what could otherwise seem wearily familiar. Miami's Coconut Grove Playhouse deftly used a pan-Hispanic ambience and interpolated / Spanish phrases to distinguish its production of John Guare's The House of Blue Leaves from the Tony-winning Broadway version, seen nationally...
...plummeting, and I'm not just talking about the polls. You can hear it among rank-and-file Republicans." To reverse the slide, the Bush team will rely more heavily on the political organization of Governor George Deukmejian. The "real Duke," as Republicans call their sober, taciturn Governor to distinguish him from Dukakis, is still mentioned as a possible running mate for Bush. But there is one major drawback to that scenario: if elected, Deukmejian would have to hand over the nation's largest statehouse to a Democrat...
...society, the term professional is used to distinguish one achievement, or one achiever, from another. There are some people and some qualities we favor, time and again. We support our hand-picked favorites with money, or with attendance at college sporting events, or with newspaper coverage. We enjoy the positive reinforcement of shared values...