Word: downplay
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...marked by some highly peculiar ellipses. He failed to mention anti-Semitism, instead contending that "ultimately" the Nazis' motive in killing Jews was to "tear up the taproot of the Christian faith." And although he claimed to speak as a "son of the German people," Benedict seemed to downplay any ordinary-German implication in the Holocaust. Instead, he placed blame on a "ring of criminals [who] rose to power by false promises ... through terror ... with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power...
Most people involved with football downplay the curse. "What we've been involved with has been coincidence after coincidence," Erb said in 2005. "We've just had a string of bad luck." After being waylaid by a broken foot in 2006, Seattle's Alexander declared, "Curse or no curse, everybody, and I mean everybody, wants to be on that cover. I don't know one person that would...
...been a truly virulent pandemic since long before the arrival of mass air transit. We're in terra incognito here. Panic would be counterproductive - especially if it results in knee-jerk reactions like closing international borders, which would only complicate the public-health response. But neither should we downplay our very real vulnerabilities. As Napolitano put it: "This will be a marathon, not a sprint." Be prepared...
...Obama Administration has given no indication that it shares the same desire. Indeed, if anything, Secretary Clinton seemed to downplay the nuclear threat from the North in her hearings. At one point, when asked about the North's alleged uranium-enrichment program, she said the U.S. had "never quite verified" its existence. That was certainly not the position of several key people in the Bush Administration - including the former President himself. The question now is, Will Pyongyang, feeling a bit ignored, raise enough of a ruckus to force itself back onto Washington's center stage? The answer...
...Sigler's and Hutchins' success, there are critics who downplay the significance of their "pioneering" work. When serving as vice president of the Science Fiction Writers of America two years ago, author Howard Hendrix, in a blog, dubbed these authors "webscabs" who are turning the role of writer into a "pixel-stained Technopeasant wretch." (Hendrix later admitted, in a "debate" with Sigler in Sept. 2007 in San Franciscio, that his comments were "incendiary," but also said, "In the long run, what you may end up with is a vast digital slush pile" and "a mass of novels written...