Word: figments
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...difficult to recognize. Sexual harassment is a professor talking about having a "magic tongue." It is grabbing a student's breast or lying on the floor and staring up her skirt...It is not, in the vast majority of cases, ambiguous behavior. It is not, as some imply, a figment of a students' imagination or a weapon women use to damage men's reputations. These worries are usually expressed by men and women who have had little experience dealing with harassment cases or who impose confusion on themselves...
...memo to Counsellor Edwin Meese, he noted that he was "perplexed" by accounts that people in the country were going hungry and asked for a "task force to bring me a no-holds-barred study" of the problem. Meese commented sanguinely: "It may turn out to be all a figment of TV's imagination." The panel is expected to be chaired by the dean of U.C.L.A.'s Graduate School of Management, J. Clayburn La Force. Complained Martha Ballou, who coordinated Minnesota's Task Force on Emergency Food and Shelter: "I don't know why the Reagan...
...about Catherine Oxenberg every now and then, but she disappeared from the spotlight back in the fall of 1979 once classes got serious. I, for one, have enjoyed the old pangs stirred up by Catherine's reemergence, not to mention the news that she was neither murdered nor the figment of someone's imagination...
...then provide a self-deprecatory definition of the word, "An addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse"? Does that mean readers seeking substantial fare should look elsewhere? Other queries quickly arise. Is this Erato who breaks into Miles' story real or a figment of his imagination? Wait a minute. She has always been a myth (has she not?), and what could possibly be called real in a made-up story that takes place entirely in a gray area suspiciously resembling a brain...
...have been operating along the border with Honduras. Since July 4, he told his audience of 30,000, the guerrillas had staged more than 18 attacks on Nicaraguan territory and killed more than 50 government troops. Ortega punctuated his statistics with repeated shouts that "this is not a figment of our imagination...