Word: earnest
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...triumphant life: the son of Italian immigrants, he scratched his way to the top of the Ford Motor Company, then guided Chrysler from the brink of financial ruin to robust health and considerable profits. And, yes, he has become a household name as the earnest TV pitchman for his company's cars. He is also the author of the best-selling autobiography ever (more than 5 million copies, hardcover and paperback, are in print) and a proud patriot who raised $277 million for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. But Iacocca has said he is "repulsed...
...then Reagan has always been attended by an aura of amiable averageness. The producer Alfred de Liagre said that Reagan on film "always had the manner of an earnest gas-station attendant." Liberal writers have dismissed him as ideologue, cretin and airhead, or worse. They have thought of Chauncey Gardiner, the transcendentally brainless seer in Jerzy Kosinski's novel Being There. Gardiner, in the eloquence of his idiocy, becomes a national oracle. "How humiliating," the columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote of Reagan in 1982, "to think of this unlettered, self-assured bumpkin being our President...
...Earnest, hard driving and highly motivated, the rising young stars of venture capitalism aim for big personal and financial rewards. A look at four achievers...
...radiant Molly Ringwald is not the only such coming attraction. Ally Sheedy, who plays the sulky flake to Molly's good girl in The Breakfast Club, is one of a lively and sometimes dazzling handful of others. Sheedy is 23 now, and the leggy, earnest, puppy-cute teenager of WarGames shows up less frequently in her movements than it used to. Her looks have always pivoted at an intriguing point between plain and stunning, a balance that is bad for a movie star but lucky for an actress. She has a pointy nose, a shock of reddish-brown hair...
MOST PEOPLE in my experience harbor a suspicion that God does not approve of their sexuality. Despite the earnest efforts of clergy and religious educators in both the Jewish and Christian traditions to suggest otherwise, the opinion subsists, fed, no doubt on the remnants of a preadolescent identification of the Divinity with one's own parents. In consequence, discussions that mix religion and sexual values tend to be particularly loaded...