Word: gibe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although it has long been famously neutral, Switzerland, as an English scholar once wrote, "has been in a state of war every weekend since 1945." The gibe has more than a little truth to it. On weekends rifle ranges around the country resound with the din of thousands of Swiss practicing their marksmanship. At the same time, Northrop F-5E Tiger fighter jets skim along mountain faces and blue-gray-uniformed figures clamber down couloirs and across alpine meadows. With a militia of 625,000 men, Switzerland, as the well-worn saying goes, does not have an army...
...third Eleanor." When Columnist Joseph Alsop, another cousin, attributed grass-roots support to Wendell Willkie, the Republican hope to topple F.D.R. in 1940, she said yes, "the grass roots of 10,000 country clubs." It was she who demolished Thomas E. Dewey, the 1944 G.O.P. candidate, with the gibe that "he looks like the little man on the wedding cake...
However much Suzman's gibe may have irritated South Africa's whites and enraged her Nationalist opponents, it was essentially accurate. While the country's whites are not so isolated as they used to be now that bombs are going off every day or so in one or another of the biggest cities, the very geography of apartheid has long and effectively separated whites and blacks. Whites are not only physically removed from black residential areas but dangerously isolated from the evidence of mounting black rage...
What was particularly galling was that there was a certain amount of truth in the gibe. As film making in Southern California has become more expensive and more difficult, other states have moved aggressively to capture a business traditionally synonymous with Hollywood. "We're losing the feature-film business," declares Maureen Kindel, president of the Los Angeles City Board of Public Works. "It's as simple as that. It's a lucrative, non-polluting and glamorous industry, and other states are making a tremendous drive to take it away from...
...measured suppleness of Balthus's paint surface now began to ossify, acquiring a thick, chalky, fresco-like appearance. It was meant to suggest the warmth and historical patina of old Roman walls, and so it did, but in a merely decorative way. "Pier rot della Francesca," the gibe of one of Balthus's contemporaries, hits the late paintings dead center...