Word: manias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While the goal of bribery is the same in Asia, the style is often very different. In Malaysia, aspiring foreign businessmen reward government officials by making use of the Malaysian mania for gambling. A common approach is to invite a minister or government official for an afternoon of golf, bet heavily and then spend the next three hours swatting the ball into sand traps. An only slightly more straightforward method is to get into an after-dinner poker game with a key civil servant and lose heavily...
Bostonians are known for their frozen dessert mania, but not enough of them have been screaming for ice cream to make selling it profitable...
...bloated arms budget not only threatens the quality and effectiveness of America's armed forces; in an era of accelerating inflation and tax-cut mania, it provokes justified fears of a "hyper-inflation" that would do more than any lag in missile production to erode American power. And if President-elect Reagan tries to dodge this specter by cutting giant swaths in social spending to make up for the tax cuts and the arms budget, the resulting domestic decay and turmoil would prove far more costly and damaging than any "perceived loss of military parity." And the American society that...
...leash is to a dog"). Elsewhere, he charts the sly history of the swing, which he describes in his book as "a pale copy of a onetime bold device for generating violent motion and emotion" of a sexual nature, mostly in women. He suggests that all forms of "bobbing mania," from lying in a hammock to tipping a rocking chair, may be "aquiver with racial memories of our arboreal ancestors swaying in a breeze...
...sugar-voiced deejays of 2 1/2 mania indignantly label Sullivan's charges "scare tactics." They provide two alternative scenarios: since 2 1/2 would allow the community to override the tax cuts by a 2/3 vote in a local election, they argue, residents will make sure there are still fire houses with the lights on. And anyway, they reason, 2 1/2 is only an attempt at tax reform; the state legislature can raise taxes and hand the money over to cities and towns, preserving services while ending the heavy dependence on property taxes...