Word: excessive
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...individuals as about their troubled nation. Here is Kramer in The Song Dog, surveying the wares at a rundown country store: "On the crowded shelf of cigarettes and pipe tobacco, he saw, for the first time in years, the little cotton bags of shag his father had smoked to excess, so crude it came complete with tobacco stalks. Good stuff, that shag: it had given the old bastard the long, lingering, thoroughly horrible death he'd deserved." Nothing more is said about that father-son relationship -- and nothing is needed. That is characteristic of the eight novels as a whole...
...economy to the tune of many billions of dollars a year. One measure is the U.S. current-account deficit with Japan: $32.3 billion in 1990. That means, in essence, that the Japanese sold $32 billion more of goods and services to Americans than Americans sold to the Japanese. The excess represents a loan to the American economy, which takes various concrete forms. For example, an estimated 20% to 40% of new U.S. Government bonds are now purchased by Japanese interests. (Opponents of U.S. aid to the Soviet Union complain that it would amount to passing money from Tokyo through Washington...
Brownell believes yo-yo dieting may eventually prove most dangerous, not for people who are vastly overweight, but for people who are continuously battling those last five or 10 excess pounds. "These people are fighting their own biology," he says. "Our notion of the ideal body is much leaner than it needs to be for health reasons...
...grade-schoolers have highlighted their staggering abhorrence of fat. Shown drawings of an obese child and children with various disabilities, they were asked whom they would select to be their friend. The obese child always came in last. Perhaps as their elders become a bit more forgiving of excess pounds and ampler figures, American youngsters will pick...
...cult of ethnicity has unhealthy consequences. It gives rise, for example, to the conception of the U.S. as a nation composed not of individuals making their own choices but of inviolable ethnic and racial groups. It rejects the historic American goals of assimilation and integration. And, in an excess of zeal, well-intentioned people seek to transform our system of education from a means of creating "one people" into a means of promoting, celebrating and perpetuating separate ethnic origins and identities. The balance is shifting from unum to pluribus...