Word: flatten
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Carolyn Rendell's direction skillfully overcame a number of potential problems. The script, for example, is highly analytical and often cynical; the general good humor and depth of Rendell's interpretation prevented a potentially self-indulgent, whiny production. Resisting the temptation to flatten the main characters into a series of caricatures, Rendell infused them with self-consciousness and deep-seated vulnerability...
...crossed eyes were held in great esteem," writes Yale anthropologist Michael Coe in his book The Maya. "Parents attempted to induce the condition by hanging small beads over the noses of their children." The Maya also seemed to go in for shaping their children's skulls: they liked to flatten them (although this may have simply been the inadvertent result of strapping babies to cradle boards) or squeeze them into a cone. Some Mayanists speculate that the conehead effect was the result of trying to approximate the shape of an ear of corn...
...unlikely to improve soon. Michael Boskin, chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, last week said he expected the economy might inch toward a 3% growth in GDP by year's end, but he also said he could not rule out the possibility that growth would again flatten out. Asked to pronounce the recession over, Boskin demurred: "We've returned to a pattern of growth...
...need for absolute goodies and absolute baddies runs deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda and denies the humanity of the dead: their sins, their virtues, their failures. To preserve complexity, and not flatten it under the weight of anachronistic moralizing, is part of the historian's task...
...tried to establish peace treaties with the various factions (millipedes, moths and flies-oh my!) in order to set up a relatively peaceful balance of power. Case in point: if the "fishermen" of the lake agree not to include me in their breakfast hunt, I promise not to flatten any more of them. Unfortunately, we seem to lack a common means of communication, and our conflicts continue...