Word: habit
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Critics have likened TV watching to drug addiction. But as the big three networks have learned to their discomfort, viewing -- at least of particular programs or channels -- is a habit considerably easier to kick than cocaine or heroin. That is why the rejoicing over last week's settlement of a 150-day strike by the Writers Guild of America was quickly tempered by caution. For the networks, their audiences and the writers themselves, the battle may be over but its effects will linger for months, perhaps years, to come...
...Iranian official suggests that U.S. ships so often query civilian airliners, and even try to order them to change course, that some pilots have got in the habit of ignoring such communications; until July 3, they got away with it. But Rogers requested and received permission from Rear Admiral Anthony Less, aboard the command ship U.S.S. Coronado, to fire. The Vincennes then launched two Standard SM-2 missiles that found their target with unerring precision...
...resistance to assimilation. The guarded symbol of Hispanic-American culture has been the tongue of flame: Spanish. But the remarkable legacy Hispanics carry from Latin America is not language -- an inflatable skin -- but breath itself, capacity of soul, an inclination to live. The genius of Latin America is the habit of | synthesis. We assimilate...
...several years now, these essays resemble closely the letters that his father used to meticulously prepare as he tried to make sense of a world whose meaning otherwise might escape him. As a young child, Coles recalls, he was perplexed by the obstinancy of his father's letter writing habit, but in this volume he seems to have grasped fully its purpose and its potential as a means of reflecting on grand themes in short spaces...
...improvements on his father's habit of writing letters is that more people are touched by Coles' inward struggles, one of the drawbacks is that it invites a kind of topicalism and didacticism which seems quite out of joint with the spirit of this book...