Word: legerdemain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ways of raising children and organizing families deprive people of old models of authority which, while inadequate, provided a resting place on the road to maturity. Therapy is being used, Lasch argues, not to help but to confuse and to take advantage of people; in the workplace, especially, psychological legerdemain is used to cloak management's lack of substantive responses to the needs of working people...
...exclusionary system is as entrenched as ever. In 1959 the late Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd introduced his plan to create ten Bantustans, or homelands, in which all of South Africa's blacks would become "citizens," regardless of whether they lived there or not. Through this curious legerdemain, Verwoerd saw a way to turn South Africa into a predominantly white country, at least on paper. Millions of blacks would continue to live and work in the vicinity of the big cities, because the South African economy needed them. But in theory they would be voting citizens of homelands hundreds...
There are thrills, wit, cinematic legerdemain here. But anyone who expects to find a string of masterpieces will be disappointed. The Trouble with Harry is a desultory exercise in macabre whimsy and naturalistic acting at its most mannered. The Man Who Knew Too Much, a remake (of Hitchcock's 1934 British thriller) that is 45 minutes longer than the original, languishes in travelogue for its first half, then indulges in frissons that for this director are routine. The technical bravado of Rope (the entire 80-min. film comprises just twelve shots, as opposed to several hundred for the average...
...downward-sloping curve that showed inflation falling from 5% this year to 3.6% in 1989. Since interest rates are related to the level of inflation, the advisers trimmed their estimate of the 1989 rate on three-month Treasury bills from the 7%-8% range to 5%. By that statistical legerdemain, the projected 1989 budget deficit shrank from more than $200 billion to $123 billion...
...games and an offer to pose en masse for Vogue-all in the reckless anticipation that miracles can strike twice. It puts unholy pressure on the young skaters, some of whom had hardly begun shaving four years ago, when Jim Craig, Mark Johnson and the rest were working their legerdemain at Lake Placid. But if any coach can reproduce a mir acle, Vairo, 38, may be the one: his own success story points to the moral that in sport, anything is possible...