Word: joking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...inspired to dedicate their lives - or at least a part of their lives - to public service. And it's possible. But a larger fraction may regard the whole exercise somewhat cynically, and the very concept of "volunteerism" under this kind of pressure may turn the word into a joke. The exclusion of kids whose parents are wealthy enough to buy their way out - as young men could buy their way out of the Civil War - will do nothing to reduce such cynicism. And young people may ask why, for example, farmers are not required to "volunteer" for a year...
...airline, is now hemorrhaging. That nice (or, rather, nasty) round figure succinctly quantifies just how dire the carrier's crisis has become. Alitalia's troubles are nothing new, of course, as the government-controlled company tallied some three billion euros in net losses between 1999-2006, becoming a running joke among industry insiders and a mounting burden on Italian taxpayers. Last fall, Prime Minister Romano Prodi declared the situation at Alitalia "out of control," and vowed to personally lead the search for a solution. But when the Italian Treasury eventually put most of its 49.9% share of Alitalia...
...Satire is essentially political; it builds an Us-vs.-Them dialectic and aims its barbs at Them. The reader or listener is expected both to get the joke and to agree with its political thrust. For example, the audiences for The Daily Show and Colbert, are part of the shows' (basically left-wing) Us, laughing at the (basically right-wing) Them who are the butts of the jokes. WWN recognized no such niceties. It tore down that wall. It ripped not just at the goofiness of pop culture but at its own readers' prurience and gullibility. ("Redneck Vampire Attacks Trailer...
...Stephen Colbert formed the word "truthiness," but decades before, WWN was the original friend of faux. It played the truthiness game at world-class level, as a joke on its readers and the rest of the media. Touting itself as "The World's Only Reliable Newspaper," WWN pioneered the notion of straight-faced news comedy. Yes, Saturday Night Live had inaugurated its "Weekend Update" in 1975, but the tactic there - as in the Brit and U.S. versions of That Was the Week That Was, in the ?60s, and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report today - was essentially a real...
...writers; they continued to toil away anonymously in American Media Inc.'s Boca Raton, Fla., home office, whose most severe brush with notoriety was during the anthrax attacks of Sept. 2001, when a photo editor opened an envelope containing the bacteria and was killed. And that was no joke...