Word: formlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...when the Assyrians, badly overextended, were taken by surprise by the combined armies of the Medes, the Babylonians and the Scythians. Nimrud was overrun. The palace caught fire, and its ceilings collapsed. Over time, the Tigris changed course, and the glorious ziggurat was reduced to a formless mound...
...colored glass dances in the flame. It loops and curls as tweezers cajole the formless blob into shape, flattening its surface and teasing out its apex, until, as if the flame has magical properties, a small, delicately structured leaf emerges. More colored glass is added to the gas jet, layer upon layer of opaque, translucent and transparent browns, yellows, oranges and reds, and one by one petals, stamens and stems bloom into being. Paul Stankard leans back from the workbench at his home in Mantua, N.J., and his broad, open face creases into a smile. "You know what...
...sessions were usually formless discussions among the 19 summiteers. They tried to decide matters by consensus. "It was like a meeting of Quakers," said Congressman Pat Williams, a Montana Democrat. "There were no votes down there. We just talked until we agreed. If people had good exceptions to proposals, then they weren't agreed...
...there is something else that makes this campaign seem somewhat unreal, so eerily formless and wide open: for the first time in decades, there are few cutting issues or themes or ideologies for the candidates to ride in their quest to break out of the pack. No candidate has been able to tap a generational yearning for "new ideas," the way Gary Hart did four years ago. No candidate has been able to gain traction through such themes as radically reversing the role of Big Government, as Ronald Reagan did eight years ago, or appealing to anti-Washington populism...
Five months before the Iowa caucuses, the campaign remains eerily formless and wide open. A TIME poll finds that many Democrats express doubts about the party' s candidates, while George Bush has regained lost ground among Republicans. -- Ultraconservatives pummel the President. -- In Pennsylvania, a controversial search for a rape suspect touches off a civil rights flap...