Word: ironization
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After Meese's stolidity and forgetfulness, Don Regan came across as a refreshing model of candor and good humor. In the days before his ouster five months ago, Regan was denigrated as an iron-fisted martinet whose poor advice to the President had only worsened the scandal. But Regan gave blunt answers to the committees and cracked self-deprecating jokes about his tenure in Washington. Describing the President as "not the type that likes to go around firing people," Regan quipped, "That's an ironic statement coming from me." It was clear that Regan had less of a grip...
Backed by movie stars who slept on iron grates to demonstrate their compassion, and passed overwhelmingly by both houses of Congress, the bill was the first comprehensive effort by the Federal Government to address the plight of the nation's estimated 2 million homeless people. Over the next two years, it will provide $1 billion for emergency shelters, some permanent housing and extra food stamps...
...Manhattan in a dog-eared hotel where drug deals and muggings go down every month or so, where one mad woman thinks she's a rooster. His home environment to some would seem a nightmare; his work environment to most would seem hell. After a day of breathing the iron filings in the New York City subways, one would think he could blow his nose and sink a Hudson River liner. Worse, a braking train in a tunnel in this town can sound like a ten- ton banshee caught in a vise. And yet there he sits, caressing an acoustic...
These geographical conditions conspired to provincialize American culture. Today, no colonial weather vane or goffering iron fails to find its collectors, and the productions of traveling limners evoke an enthusiasm that might once have seemed excessive for Gainsborough. Nevertheless, most American towns looked more like Dogpatch than Williamsburg, and none of them could have been confused with Bath. The best American minds, like Thomas Jefferson, were by no means unaware of this. Jefferson in the early 1780s complained that many of the buildings in Virginia's capital of Williamsburg were rude, misshapen piles "in which no attempts are made...
...same thing for dancing. Before the advent of sound movies, dance for most Americans meant tap dancers "laying down iron" in vaudeville. Before Astaire, screen dance was a thundering herd of chorines tapping out a Busby Berkeley abstraction. "I didn't think I had too much of a chance," Astaire would later say -- with good reason. To be sure, he and his sister Adele had worked their way from Omaha through small-time vaudeville to stage stardom in New York and London. But Adele had retired, and at 34, Fred was not obvious star material: a skinny fellow with...