Word: harmlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...larger, darker forces conjured up by the term -- Macbeth's weird sisters and the like -- are given an extra twist with the slangy, bastard suffix -o. Beneath the linguistic roots, however, we feel the difference on our pulses. The eccentric we generally regard as something of a donny, dotty, harmless type, like the British peer who threw over his Cambridge fellowship in order to live in a bath. The weirdo is an altogether more shadowy figure -- Charles Manson acting out his messianic visions. The eccentric is a distinctive presence; the weirdo something of an absence, who casts no reflection...
...return to chemical-weapons production results from more than a decade of Defense Department efforts to persuade Congress to fund so-called binary weapons -- devices in which the two comparatively harmless components of a deadly compound are stored and transported separately. Only when the components combine -- when the shells are fired, for example -- do they become toxic...
...leads to disaster. "It ruins everything that matters to you," says New York Times Reporter Nan Robertson, a recovered alcoholic. "In the end, the bottle is your only friend. Alcoholics would rather do anything than stop drinking." For the vast majority of Americans, the occasional social drink is a harmless affair. For the afflicted, however, the most innocent gathering of family or friends -- a wedding at a suburban country club, a casual gathering on an urban sidewalk -- can turn into a nightmare of temptation, indulgence and worse. Recalls a youthful recovering alcoholic: "My biggest fear was getting through life without...
...Bernardo Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris) would surely not have obtained a passport to visit the Forbidden City, let alone explore its ruler's forbidden soul. Last year, though, the director received free range of both from Pu Yi's successors, who regard his final, harmless-dodderer incarnation as an exemplary triumph for their system. The result is a film epic in length (almost three hours), vision (the reimagining of a lost and exotic world) and imagery (formal and glowing). Yet at its center is an anti-epic figure, inarticulate and victimized. The movie must therefore depend...
Some, though, stuck to more harmless displays of spirit. A group of Weld residents chanted the choruses of "Jingle Bells" and "Row, Row, Row Your Boat...