Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Washington was slow to grasp the problem. Clinton had allowed his embassy in Seoul (as well as in Tokyo) to go without an ambassador for a year. Not that the Koreans were helping. For months, they had refused to admit their problems or even provide credible accounting of their assets and liabilities. By November the embattled government of Kim Young Sam was refusing to explain to U.S. officials just how much money was left in its foreign-currency reserve. Along with negotiators from the IMF, Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers pushed Seoul to clarify its reserve positions...
...Standup Stapler An idea you grasp right away. The last time the stapler got serious thought was in the 1930s, when objects were streamlined for the machine-age imagination. In the ergonomic '90s, when we design for the body, the Boston stapler still keeps a nice contour. It's as grip-friendly as a handshake, as squeezable as a teddy bear, and better looking than most public sculpture...
...shows are scorned as cut-rate imitations of Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. ("The man writes galumphing, dunderheaded musicals that make...everything by Andrew Lloyd Webber seem like great art"--Newsday.) But he is a musical populist and proud of it. "Lyrics can be hard to grasp," he says. "If the music isn't comfortable on the ear and doesn't let the audience flow with it, you can miss a lot." Says Pimpernel producer Kathleen Raitt: "Nobody but the public loves his music...
...Prince Charles in him, a vestige of the style of upper Cumberland, Tenn., "that emphasizes formalism in public presentation," he told TIME last week. "I think I absorbed that, but I'm slowly learning how to transcend it." Until that happens, Gore's famous stiffness and failure to grasp the trick of compelling self-presentation are no small problem. His own boss is the best possible example of the advantages that go to politicians who can mass market the human touch. And Gore's success in positioning himself as a centrist may actually have made his shortcomings as a personality...
Best of all, though, vocally and comedically, was John Bernard as Alfredo, a character whose very name suggests the world of opera he was to lambaste. Bernard seemed for all the world to be reprising Kevin Kline's role in A Fish Called Wanda, only with a better grasp of Italian. His onstage, offstage, and backstage impromptu arias paid tribute to "La Traviata," "Tosca," "Turandot," "L'Elisir d'Amore," "Der Rosenkavalier, "Aida," and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." As Rosalinda's lover, his goodbye kiss at the end of act one, when he was being...