Word: knock
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Once upon a time, the nation's leaders tried to exorcise the deficit devil with a frightful fairy tale: if they couldn't find the wisdom and courage to reduce spending and raise revenue themselves, a crude wrecking ball would knock many billions from government programs. The threat of an indiscriminate "sequester" of funds, the story went, would be so politically devastating as to scare the government into facing its fiscal responsibilities. That fantasy, in the form of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act five years ago, projected a balanced budget by fiscal 1991, which begins Oct. 1. But the brutal...
...Friars saw opportunity knock loud and clear in the first five minutes of the game. With a gaping defensive hole, senior Crimson goalie Beth Reilly could only admire as the point-blank Friars shot from 16 yards out settled into the upper-right corner...
...bats and even broomsticks that residents are using to secure windows and doors. Fueling the hysteria are unconfirmed reports that the killer sliced off and carried away flesh from some of his victims. Says sheriff's department Lieutenant Spencer Mann: "People are calling in when they hear a branch knock up against the side of their house." Until the killer is apprehended, the good times in Gainesville are over...
...1930s to active inventory. Memorialized in gangster movies and in TV's The Untouchables, the Thompson submachine gun, it turns out, can still outmatch some of its modern successors: one of its .45-cal. slugs, spewed out at a rate of up to 800 rounds a minute, will knock down even the biggest bad guy. By contrast, the Israeli-made Uzi, the current weapon of choice among many criminals and some lawmen, uses smaller bullets; one hit is often not enough...
...knock against Kurt Vonnegut, back a couple of decades ago when he was a cult author, was that he pandered too glibly to the natural cynicism of the disaffected young. He was too quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired...