Word: givens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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More than a million lie-detector tests were given in the U.S. last year, 90% of them by private employers to their workers. Most polygraphs were for routine screening of job applicants or random testing for deterring theft. Last week the Senate passed a bill limiting the use of polygraphs in job screening for all workers except security guards and those with access to controlled substances. The new law was necessary, said Senator Edward Kennedy, to protect people from "20th century witchcraft . . . inaccurate instruments of intimidation." An employer could still test a worker reasonably suspected of wrongdoing. But the bill...
Iacocca's most startling disclosure is that last year he explored the possibility of a $40 billion takeover of beleaguered General Motors, which is four times Chrysler's size. As proposed by Edward Hennessy, chairman of the industrial conglomerate Allied-Signal, the takeover would have given Allied- Signal GM's auto-supply operations and Chrysler the rest. After talking it over with investment bankers and lawyers, Iacocca rejected the notion as too much of a reach. Said he: "I concluded that it might be easier to buy Greece...
...gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said -- could it not? -- of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially...
...blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("Caramba! Quien sabe?"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity -- and divinity -- of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, Sub-Committees and Secretariats...
...holds several thousand political prisoners and that some are being kept in dungeon-like jails and have been tortured. Last week a five-member panel from the International Committee of the Red Cross began a month-long inspection tour of 15 prisons, the first time the organization has been given permission to make such an investigation. The group's first stop was the Boniato jail, where the investigators reportedly found no plantados, the counterrevolutionaries who allegedly have come in for harsh treatment because they refuse rehabilitation...