Word: draconian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Grating Noise. To officials in Tokyo, those threats seemed too draconian to be believed. A special U.S. tariff lasting until the yen was revalued enough to please Washington would amount to an unprecedented and almost unimaginable action; the U.S. would be attempting to blackjack a friendly nation into fixing a value for its money that Washington in effect would decide. Finance Minister Fukuda dismissed that talk as a zatsuon (grating noise). A Tokyo banker added that the idea of cutting U.S. shipments of raw materials to Japan was "reminiscent of the eve of Pearl Harbor, when the Roosevelt Administration placed...
...operas usually produced by today's leading composers. As a way out of this impasse, Pierre Boulez, the aging enfant terrible of French music, once suggested blowing up all the old opera houses and starting anew. Britten's Owen Wingrave at least suggests that less draconian musical measures are possible...
Pinch the Poor. Lindsay buttressed his appeal to the Governor with what he called four budget options, a kind of fiscal edition of a Chinese menu. The most draconian assumes no restoration of aid or new city taxes; it would call for, besides the elimination of 90,000 jobs, the closing of eight city hospitals, not admitting a freshman class next fall at the City University of New York, and eliminating almost all city-sponsored cultural and recreational services. From there the mayor's options become increasingly more palatable until Option 4, a Utopian dream that has the state...
...both the emphasis and the rhetoric have changed. The language of legal reform has replaced draconian appeals. "By reforming criminal justice in America," Mitchell said recently, "and attacking the environmental roots of crime, we may dare to look toward an enlightened day when we will need fewer, rather than more prisons, police stations and even courthouses...
...tall-backed electric chair in Texas' Huntsville Prison has gathered a fine coating of dust since it was last used in 1965. About 100 men sit on death rows throughout the state, restlessly awaiting the outcome of their legal appeals. If thousands of Texans had their draconian way, the prisoners would not have to wait much longer...