Word: ferment
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These last entries are likely to attract most of the preliminary attention. The OED2 co-editors, John Simpson and Edmund Weiner, note that the generating ferment in English has shifted from the literary world toward those of science, business, medicine and North American slang. In fact, a partial listing of what the language has been up to lately is enough to inspire depression: brain-dead, nose job, right-to-die, acid rain, crack, heat-seeker, asset stripping, greenmail, petro-currency, barf, drunk tank. There is not much here that would inspire Keats to write...
...since Stalin slammed down the Iron Curtain four decades ago has Europe witnessed such ferment east of the Elbe as that unleashed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's campaign to reshape socialist politics and economics. In the past, when opposition escalated, the Kremlin dispatched tanks and troops to crush dissent. But since coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev himself has been the chief dissident, leading the assault on the status quo. Acknowledging that there is no "binding model" for socialism, he has encouraged pluri- Communism in Eastern Europe...
WORLD: As ferment in Eastern Europe reaches new heights, the West debates whether it should seek an opening...
...years ago this spring, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) was in a ferment, arguing heatedly about the implementation of the new Core Curriculum and its implications for Harvard's undergraduates...
About a mile away, in a plaza of cultural palaces around a gushing fountain, patrons stroll into the white marble monument that houses Los Angeles' older, more conventional-seeming Mark Taper Forum. Visually, the contrast between the Taper and the L.A.T.C. is stark. But the ferment, the embrace of the new and the political consciousness are much the same at both. Throughout its 21-year history under artistic director Gordon Davidson, the Taper has thrived on controversy. FBI agents, for example, sat alert at the opening of Daniel Berrigan's The Trial of the Catonsville Nine in 1970, hoping...