Word: husked
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...poetic naturalism. The bums in Ironweed were not noble, but they had their own gravelly, poignant voices. The family Francis left behind was ordinary as linoleum, but their emptiness left a sympathetic ache in the reader's gut. Francis was drab and cramped on the outside, that husk of a booze-wracked body, but he didn't live there. He came to life inside, with way too many other people -- the loves, enemies and chances he had lost -- in the decaying mansion of his memories. What a lovely movie might dwell there...
They still do, but today monumental is a husk of a word. In the past ten years, it has decayed to mean nothing more than "very big." American cities are now generously speckled with abstract ironmongery: sculpture that means nothing but is part of the perfunctory etiquette of urban development, most of it larger than it needs to be. Locked in a losing battle with the megacity environment, it manages to look both arrogant and depleted...
...purpose in culling such items is optimistic; we would like to see through to the real Mr. Andropov, clasp him to our bosom and cast aside the husk. In Andropov's case, the husk is considerable: a 15-year hitch as head of the most powerful secret police in the world, a three-year term as Soviet Ambassador to Hungary, where he may or may not have acquired his penchant for furniture, but did help crush a revolution; membership in the inner circle that decided Czechoslovakia deserved an invasion in 1968. He has also been a longtime quasher...
True enough. But death had come at last to convicted I.R.A. Terrorist and Hunger Striker Robert (Bobby) Gerard Sands, 27, by virtue of his own will. His earthly remains were little more than a husk after a 66-day fast in the H-block section of Northern Ireland's Maze Prison. He was the first I.R.A. member to starve himself to death since 1976, the 13th Irish Nationalist to do so in this century. Sands had failed in his mam aim: to force the British government to grant special political status to himself and 700 other I.R.A. members imprisoned...
...best approach to running a University: it leaves the facades of Harvard intact while disaffection breeds within. If the University does not take steps, today, towards restoring a sense of responsibility at every level of its operations, it will find itself become a husk of a college, with the walls intact but deadness within...