Word: fillip
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...chat online until your fingers are raw, but you still can't convey the emotional subtlety of tete-a-tete conversation. That's why emoticons were invented, those clever keyboard images designed to punctuate online palaver with a fillip of feeling. Some have become well known: ;-) is a wink and a smile (in other words, aren't I ironic?). But the art form has spread beyond its first primitive symbols to become an increasingly complex form of Net expression. Herewith a quick sampling of the latest in postliterate sign language...
...that Beijing must take "further concrete and verifiable action to reduce piracy at its source and at its borders." In an exclusive interview Tuesday with TIME editors, new Secretary of Commerce Mickey Kantor, who until recently held the U.S. trade post, said the factory closings may be just a fillip. "I am somewhat skeptical. They have opened and closed plants many times. We have to be realistic given China's situation internally, and that they have investors. But the Chinese knew that when they signed the (copyright) agreement 14 months ago." The Clinton Administration's tough talk and Beijing...
...Coens have tempered their style from the daredevil camerabatics of Blood Simple and Raising Arizona; they now seek the extra fillip of incident and character in the corner of every frame. Each of the hard gents in Miller's Crossing finds his own space and his own reasons for pushing others out of it. Leo, for example, is given a blaze of glory as he defends his life against Caspar's goons. To the strains of Danny Boy he strides from his home, machine gun flaring, a dinosaur who refuses to die. "The old man," one friend says wistfully...
However new initiates fare -- and enrollment in German courses around the world is rapidly increasing -- one thing is certain: Germany's regained prominence will give a fillip to wider usage of the language, and is bound as well to contribute more words to other tongues. Already television viewers in the U.S. have seen signs of a heightened linguistic confidence on the part of the Germans. One example: a Volkswagen ad campaign that centers on the word Fahrvergnugen, or joy in driving -- however mispronounced it may be in the commercials. Only a few years ago, the use of a German word...
...preview. The draw: the U.S. stage debut of the company's founder, Kenneth Branagh, 28. His gutsy current film of Henry V has won him comparison to Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier. As he did in the film, Branagh onstage would triple as impresario, director and star -- with the fillip of featuring his wife of five months, Emma Thompson, as Midsummer's willowy Helena and Lear's gnarled Fool. Despite the troupe's alphabetical billing, what was on offer was plainly a star turn...