Word: gumption
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...wanted in the U.S. But last week the Colombian House of Representatives voted to put the question of extradition on a nationwide referendum early next year. In so doing, the legislators effectively washed their hands of the issue and admitted to their constituents that they do not have the gumption to make tough decisions for the country's overall good if it means endangering their own lives...
...film of the decade. And it may be the last of the millennium, so far out of favor (and economic viability) have historical epics of all kinds fallen. Maybe one's good response to Glory derives from the sheer novelty of the thing and from admiration for the producers' gumption in flinging it in the face of the movie audience's indifference to the pretelevised past...
...Money, Life and Sports. Pages of USA Today are taped on a wall next to a sign reading YOUR GUIDE TO EXCELLENCE. Despite the Sun's derivative quality, Ingersoll describes the paper as "my PM, in the sense that it's creative and no one else has had the gumption...
...Gumption or no, skeptics perceive an Oedipal element behind the enterprise. After joining the small-paper business launched by his father, the younger Ingersoll clashed with him early and often, tried to break free, then forced him out of the partnership in a financial settlement that the elder Ingersoll considered unfair. Thereafter, father and son spoke infrequently. Ingersoll blames the tension largely on his stepmother; at his father's funeral in 1985, the widow and the namesake son held separate receptions...
...memoirs. The first, Growing Up (1982), won a Pulitzer Prize, stayed on best-seller lists for nearly a year, and remains a masterstroke of unpretentious autobiography. It too got its direction from the character of Lucy Elizabeth Baker, the needy young widow whose platitudes about hard work and gumption herded Russell and his sister through the Great Depression...