Word: distressingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...criticism is partly self-fulfilling. "The westerners tell us, 'You're dumb. You can't do anything right,' " says Jorg Richter, a psychologist in east Berlin. "That makes people emotionally ill." The sense of psychic distress is so widespread that politicians often use the language of clinical psychology to discuss Germany's problems. Zukunftsangst is fear of the future. Wendekrankheit -- turnabout sickness -- describes the general malaise that has accompanied the sharp dislocations associated with unification...
Ossis certainly have good reason for distress. Of an eastern work force of 9 million, 840,000 are officially jobless and 2 million are being paid to do little or nothing on a government-subsidized system of "short-time work." When these job-protection agreements end, as many as 4 million easterners will lose even short-time work. That level would be catastrophic in any society, but is even more so in one with a deeply ingrained work ethic...
Hospital administrators and doctors, who give interviews in rooms invariably decorated with a portrait of Saddam Hussein smiling benevolently, are often reluctant to admit the extent of the health disaster they are witnessing. But signs of distress are everywhere. Many hospitals were damaged by allied bombing, including three in Baghdad and two in Basra. Completely destroyed was the only hospital in the country that performed kidney transplants and advanced heart surgery. In other cases, physical damage to medical facilities was caused by the civilian uprisings that followed...
Alas, a career full of lost skirmishes with the moguls proved that even Welles couldn't shake Hollywood free of its romantic realism. It held then; it holds today. Except that now the old glamour has atrophied into formula: boy's adventures and ghost stories and lady-in-distress thrillers. When was the last time a Hollywood picture moved anyone to exclaim, "Well, I've never seen that before!"? Perhaps surprise is not on the menu of today's moviegoers. They want reassurance, domestic fairy tales come true, not the astonishment that Jean Cocteau demanded...
This is probably the only kind of fly-rod fishing that causes more distress in the angler than in the fish. No other angling contains such extremes of frustration and exhilaration. One hears middle-aged enthusiasts declare it to be "better than sex." Perhaps not, but the two activities have something in common: the first try is an embarrassment; everything goes wrong. With tarpon, however, it keeps going wrong...