Word: jerkingly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...traders will tell you that the distinguishing characteristic of a true bottom is sort of like a watched pot: When market-watchers yell "bottom" every time they get a day's rally, it breeds the kind of fleeting, knee-jerk optimism that keeps a real bottom from ever settling in. A real bottom is a thing of unabated pessimism and unapologetic capitulation, in which everybody jumps out the window and waits more than one hot minute before reentering the building and getting in the elevator...
...Internet incriminated Liao; it also may absolve him. The chat transcripts have convinced detectives the death was an accident. It's a measure of how cool Taiwan has become that the case has triggered none of the opprobrium that would have been knee-jerk just 10 years ago. Liao is out on bail, and will probably be charged with involuntary manslaughter and destruction of a body, which together carry a maximum prison sentence of seven years. The lesson: think twice if someone asks you to come out to play...
...Warshow WHO HE? from an old and learned friend. HE'S LEARNED, SO YOU'RE LEARNED? My friend had so thoroughly marked up the text that his annotations constituted a parallel text of its own, consisting of his annoyances, approvals, elaborations, questions and challenges. SO? [Warshow is famous, you jerk...
What should the loser do? First, be elaborately gracious--for 15 or 20 minutes, anyway. Call for national unity. Congratulate the jerk who beat you. Walk away jauntily, as if you'd won. In a sense, you did. No talk about stolen elections. No "I was robbed!" Don't look back. Americans are sick of the subject anyway, and have drawn their own conclusions...
...Granted that the networks had to put something on screen, some of the choices were crass enough to mortify the no-cameras-in-the-court purists; CNN's choice to show the courtroom "won-loss" record of lawyers, for instance, was the sort of knee-jerk ballgame mentality that confirms 24-hour news's worst tendencies. But the visuals were beside the point: The verbal back-and-forth itself was not only riveting but a salutary thing for the whole polarized country to hear, even if most of us could understand one out of every three terms...