Word: flitting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Founded in Britain by John Ruskin and William Morris as an antidote to the shoddy wares of the Industrial Revolution, the movement was brought to the U.S. by Gustav Stickley. Its principles have blurred, but the work produced by its philosopher-practitio ners endures. Example: the incised birds that flit across the flowers on Mary Frances Overbeck's exquisite ceramic vase...
Give it a break, Jeff. Protesters are not "like birds ... who like nothing more than to flock together," and who flit from issue to issue in search of the chic-est cause. Activists are thinking people who, for the most part, ascribe to a broad left-wing agenda. Their personal political concerns may range from union organizing, to feminism, to national self-determinism in the third world, to civil rights struggles here at home...
...clumps of stoic people waiting for buses that arrive infrequently and full. The bus fleet, local wisdom has it, has almost been run off the road because its mechanics are employed fixing the army's Soviet T-54 tanks. Many people resort to walking, and after dark, shadowy figures flit ghostlike through a heavy shroud of exhaust fumes created by engines vigorously protesting the shortage of spare parts...
...hysterical woman even beyond the call of role and duty. And as Walter, Etienne Glaser lacks the intelligent aura his part requires. He can say, "In opera we are like silence in music," but it is neither profound nor comic. And the custodians and maids of the opera house flit across the screen just long enough to express their views...
...human eye, the animals so often seem mirages: now you see them, now you don't. Later, just after dusk, Abyssinian nightjars discover the magic wash of the headlight beams. The birds flit in and out of the barrels of light, like dolphins frisking before a boat's prow. The Land Cruiser jostles, in four-wheel drive, across black volcanic stones toward the camp, the driver steering by the distant light-speck of the cooking fire...