Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...moment, the cowboys are simply trying to shoot straight. "Cowboy four," Captain Anderson, an earnest young Florida-born pilot whose dentist father talked him past a water-skiing career by providing flying lessons at 16, is up. Circling a mile high around the mountains, Anderson suddenly dives to 200 feet to avoid "enemy" radar and screams at 600 m.p.h. toward the intended victim, an Army surplus M-47 tank having a bad day. The desert is a Jackson Pollock abstract, and Anderson is so low that when he is just four miles away, he can't see the tank...
...contradictions extend to his personality. In public, the buttoned-down Gore is solemn and earnest. A joke among the press corps is, How do you tell Al Gore from his Secret Service protection? Answer: He's the stiff one. In private, he is funny and irreverent, a good mimic and storyteller. In the right setting he will debate not only the virtues of the Midgetman missile, but whether the Beatles were a better group than the Rolling Stones (yes, he says...
Union organizers and Harvard administrators say that they do not plan to accelerate their campaigning in earnest until HUCTW files its election cards, the next step in having a campus-wide union vote. But, in the past two weeks, by all accounts, campaigning on both sides has become much more vocal...
...other newlyweds share a rented house and begin "playing at being Grown-ups." But the husbands, at least, hope that the game is temporary: "I think we were all frightened at the thought that the war might end, and then we'd have to start being grown-ups in earnest, with children and mortgages and debts...
Suddenly the earnest, Howdy Doody-ish Midwesterner became an old-fashioned firebrand. He had found a voice that worked. "Dick has touched a deep-seated fear about the economic future of the nation," says Kirk O'Donnell, president of the Center for National Policy, a Democratic-oriented think tank. "This is powerful stuff...