Word: guff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mannerism in Europe by the late 1930s, and was revived in America by artists who discarded its utopian fantasies and replaced them with ideas related to epic space, primitive ritual, spontaneous gesture and the sublime. But who today still buys the rhetoric that surrounded Abstract Expressionism--all that oracular guff about existential confrontation, tragedy, timelessness and how we're locking horns with Michelangelo...
Stephen King here tries a novel without his customary latex spider webs and prop-department zombies, and nearly makes it work. What drives Dolores Claiborne is a powerful characterization of the title figure, a cranky old Maine islander who takes no guff from life or death. In a rasping, unrepentant tale to police, she admits to murdering her rotten husband 30 years ago. Narrative logic is murky here, but her confession is supposed to show that, on the other hand, she has not murdered her employer, a rich, loony off-islander...
...tactical commanders when he first proposed it last November. They argued that more than 150,000 soldiers could not be moved that far that fast, with all their armor, artillery and 60 days of ammunition and supplies, over a desert with only rudimentary roads. "I got a lot of guff," he recalls. "They thought that Schwarzkopf had lost his marbles." So stiff was their resistance that Schwarzkopf ordered his logistics commander, Major General William Pagonis, to sign his name to a pledge that the troops and their equipment would be in place by the Feb. 21 deadline...
Over the years Picasso has been the subject of much penetrating scholarship, but also of too much guff. There have been hundreds of books about Picasso, but no really satisfactory biography until now. Those written in English tended to be useful but overadoring, like the 1958 life by his close friend Roland Penrose; or deplorably ignorant, like Picasso: Creator and Destroyer (1988), by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. To draw Picasso whole, in full context, is a daunting task; but now that the first of John Richardson's four volumes is out, one sees that it could indeed be done...
...phone call was especially important. Before the crisis, Japan imported 12% of its oil from Iraq and Kuwait. Nonetheless, Bush persuaded Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu to join the boycott of Iraqi crude. "People are always giving Bush guff for his first-name strategy with world leaders," says an Administration official. "But then he calls Tokyo and gets Kaifu to go along with the oil embargo, a step that may not be in Japan's self-interest. To say we were surprised is to put it mildly." Equally impressive was the President's engineering of United Nations sanctions against Iraq...