Word: familiar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last month Linda Hiwot, a Brooklyn junior high school teacher, got a surprise when she phoned her bank for a credit-card balance. Instead of the familiar human teller, she was answered by a computer-generated voice that told all callers with Touch-Tone phones to "press 1 now," thus beginning a series of steps that would eventually lead to her balance. When she called the IRS about an overdue tax check, another computer voice directed her to "push 9" for refunds. Even a local department store had acquired a robot operator, which like an overeager clerk insisted on taking...
...their layers of meaning. (The play's coy title is a spelling-bee word meaning charitable.) Yet for all their brains, beguiling eccentricity and epic betrayal, the women are touchingly ordinary in matters of the heart. Every woman, and everyone who knows and loves one, will recognize too familiar truths in the dilemmas Blessing depicts: mothers who urge freedom but see children as a chance to fulfill their own thwarted dreams, children who adore their parents but feel compelled to compete with them or simply...
...Harvard locker room parlance, 'defense' usually refers to U.S. capabilities vis-a-vis NATO, 'formations' often are those of molecules and 'Big Red' is the people's Republic of China. But we try to keep familiar with all the definitions to keep the coaches happy."--Harvard defensive tackle Jim Bell discussing the football team's plays...
...strangeness is both spiced and complicated further by stubborn traces of the familiar. On Flag Day, a legal secretary suddenly re-emerges as a taupou, or ceremonial virgin. A U.S. Army man appears amid a group of spear- shaking warriors in lavalava skirts, fierce tattoos on many thighs. A former Hollywood bit actor resumes his role as the "talking chief" of Leone, leading his villagers through hymn-inflected island chants and primal dances. And then, just before Governor Peter Coleman, Congressman Eni Faleomavaega and various other dignitaries get ready to join in the final swaying dance, a village chorus sits...
...British themselves are more divided. There are few outright swooners. And the complaints resemble familiar complaints against the Republican Administration that has ruled America during most of the Thatcher era. She has created, say both the left and the traditional right, a vulgar, selfish, money-obsessed society, drained of more humane values. Her prosperity has been selective; the gap between haves and have-nots has increased. She has ignored the environment, allowed the public infrastructure to rot, starved the universities and other worthy institutions and causes that depend on public funds. For all her talk of freedom...