Word: meagerness
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...amount of goodies provided in past years, moreover, makes this year's handouts appear meager. For example, in 1979, everything from to shirts to hats to playing cards both that year's reunion slogan. "The Great Comeback of '54." When the Class of 1956 held its reunion in 1981, even trash cans and license plates accompanied the usual frisbees and towels on the list of trinkets bearing the MCMLVI REDUX slogan...
Overall, the results of the summit seemed at best meager for a long-prepared meeting of world leaders. But that is becoming the way with these annual sessions. Reagan and his senior aides regarded the first two that the President attended as important tests of his ability to cut a respectable figure on the world stage, but have been let down by the last three. Says one adviser bluntly: "It's getting to be a bore...
...between 200 and 500 dong--worth no more than $55 even at the official exchange rate. Housing is free for civil servants: Nguyen Than Tan, 24, a Foreign Ministry employee, shares a 10-ft. by 12-ft. dormitory room with three other men. Food is subsidized, but rations are meager. Officially, low-level bureaucrats are allowed each day about a pound of rice, an ounce of meat, a few vegetables, a bit of milk, coffee and a couple of cigarettes. In the private street stalls, groceries are abundant but very expensive. There, rice might cost 150 times as much...
Civil liberties are meager. The "re-education camps" hold some 10,000 prisoners. Says a Vietnamese scholar familiar with postwar Hanoi: "What surprised me was how the society in the North was so isolated from the rest of the world, even from the East bloc countries. It was like Russian society in the '30s." It is still hermetic: during 1983, Viet Nam admitted exactly 252 tourists...
...formal creation." The chapter, "An Extended Orient: Exoticism" criticizes at length the borrowing of imagery by the French as sheer indulgence. Gautier's Avatar is dismissed as the work of an exploitive dilettante with a "strikingly apparent gift for painting generalized pictures." Similarly, Hugo's Orientales is dismissed as "meager picturesque Orient imposed upon Montparnasse landscape...