Word: heedless
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Perhaps this sense of heedless omniscience is what council leaders like Kenneth E. Lee and former Residential Committee Chair Gregory R. Schwartz '89 object to when they complain of seeming to protest College proposals in a vacuum...
...Quayle, in his debate with Lloyd Bentsen, was heedless enough to bring up Kennedy's name. Bentsen, who has good reflexes, saw the opening: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Michael Dukakis has been more dignified, but more relentless, about comparing himself with Kennedy, or at any rate comparing 1960 with 1988. Again and again, from the Democratic Convention on, he has told audiences, "Twenty-eight years ago, another son of Massachusetts and another son of Texas were our nominees . . ." Dukakis wants to borrow a small radiance of analogy. Ted Sorensen, the author of so many of Kennedy's speeches...
That is a rare, fancy metaphor that can be backed up by hard numbers. The Pentagon has indeed been on a long binge: in the eight years of the Reagan Administration, Congress will have handed it $2.2 trillion -- trillion! A good deal of that has been dribbled away in heedless, indiscriminate spending. Now the bills are coming due -- literally, in the case of a number of supersophisticated weapons systems nearing production. Meanwhile, the Defense Department has been forced by the overall federal budget squeeze to embrace a decidedly unfamiliar, and in its eyes hideous, new bride: austerity...
Even though superheated consumer buying has helped fuel the economic boom of the 1980s, the heedless lack of saving also poses serious dangers. With too few reserves to fall back on, consumers might have to restrict their spending severely during a recession and thus aggravate the downturn. Other harmful side effects have already shown up. Profligate consumer spending on imported goods has ballooned the U.S. trade deficit, while the dwindling national pool of savings has forced America to borrow from abroad to meet its financing needs. Says Investment Banker Peter Peterson, a former Commerce Secretary: "Correcting the current imbalance assumes...
...course, all these matters will be settled by the heedless masses of people who rarely look at dictionaries, much less write them; that is the way of linguistic evolution. So is there any point in resisting changes that may be inevitable? Yes, indeed, as the late poet and translator John Ciardi eloquently argued. "Those who care," Ciardi wrote, "have a duty to resist. Changes that occur against such resistance are tested changes. The language is the better for them -- and for the resistance." It is regrettable that RHD-II resists so little. But it is admirable that it erects such...