Word: hollow
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...newfound grit are the two most famous speeches. When Lois Smith, giving the finest performance of a great stage career, says as Ma Joad that she knows "the people" will endure, she offers none of the reassuring faith of Jane Darwell in the film. Her words are instead the hollow attempt of a frightened peasant to calm herself and to reassure a son she expects never to see again. When Gary Sinise as Tom Joad tells her that wherever people are organizing for freedom and a better day, he will be there, he does not ooze nature's-aristocrat nobility...
...Gorbachev's personal first five-year plan. It is therefore a time of judgment. The judgment is harsh. The lot of the Soviet consumer is not just stagnating but deteriorating. Efficiency, incentive, initiative, competitiveness, productivity, quality, pride, "self-accountability" -- these new buzz words are beginning to sound as hollow as the old slogans about the glory of socialist labor...
...less gleefully and start worrying that perhaps the resulting instability would be a greater threat to world peace than the old, seemingly monolithic communist menace. Yet once it happened, the whole spectacle had a look of something like inevitability. The governments of Eastern Europe had never been more than hollow administrations installed and maintained by Moscow's armed forces. They were rejected as Marxist, but even more as Russian, a double affront to the proud nationalism of countries that believed the West ended at Poland's eastern frontier. Once it became clear that Gorbachev meant what he said, the opposition...