Word: fronting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...species: the fidgeter, who spins pens or reorders papers or plays with his phone during meetings. (I stand guilty as charged. On occasion, I have also been known to whisper.) We doodlers, fidgeters and whisperers always get the same jokey, passive-aggressive line from the authority figure at the front of the room: "I'm sorry, are we bothering you?" How droll. But the underlying message is clear: Pay attention...
...some instances, peanut-free zones seem downright silly. Upon request, Delta and Northwest airlines will set up a peanut-free buffer zone spanning three rows in front of and behind an allergic passenger. (Why three rows instead of four or five?) Foodmakers have also gone a little overboard. In 2006 a federal law started requiring companies to use plain language to note the presence in their products of any of eight major allergens: milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat and soybeans. But concern about liability claims led manufacturers to voluntarily supplement these labels with alerts on products...
...first met Dorje in front of the gates of the Longwu Monastery in Tongren, a town in China's far-western Qinghai province. Like the majority there, he was an ethnic Tibetan, a nomadic yak breeder in town on a pilgrimage. While friendly toward foreigners, Dorje nodded at the video cameras mounted above the road and said we'd better speak somewhere private. It's a grim commentary on the iron grip China maintains on Tibetan areas of the country that even a yak herdsman knows to be wary of video surveillance. In a sheltered corner of the monastery...
...Late in the summer of 2006, the top Marine intelligence officer in Iraq cabled his superiors at the Pentagon that the war was essentially lost in Anbar; his dire assessment soon surfaced on the front page of the Washington Post. "The prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim," the newspaper said, summarizing the report. "There is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there." One anonymous official who read the report flatly told the paper "the United States has lost in Anbar." (See pictures of the Anbar Awakening movement...
...setting, for starters, was no high school locker room at halftime, with sweaty teenagers scratching their gym socks. Robed Supreme Court Justices and barrel-chested generals sat in the front row at the U.S. House Chamber, a gold-encrusted place overflowing with political power. For a quarter-mile around, police stood shivering in the cold, watchful in clumps on street corners, stopping anyone who looked out of place. (Read the full text of Obama's speech...