Word: mocking
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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USAGE The phrase was coined to mock the economic inequality that some say started with Ronald Reagan's "trickle down" theory. But this is, at best, an imprecise analogy, because money isn't flowing from poor people's pockets straight to the rich: the pie is getting bigger for everyone. From 2000 to 2005, pretax income for the bottom half grew 15.5%. The rich just got a larger cut of overall growth (a 19% gain for the richest 1%). Perhaps better, then, to call it the big-slice theory...
That’s Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” of course; a mock-epic, 15-part poem that contains every major mythological story of antiquity. Ten of these stories have been adapted to the stage by playwright Mary Zimmerman and produced at Harvard by Allison B. Kline ’09, Julia K. Lindpaintner ’09, and Maria-Ilinca Radulian ’10. In the capable hands of visiting director Carmel O’Reilly, last Friday’s opening performance was sometimes spellbinding, sometimes frustrating, and sometimes both...
...only emboldened both countries by trying to inoculate itself against the Iranian threat with a missile shield that it resolutely tries to place on Russia's doorstep. Rice was made to wait 45 minutes at an Oct.12 meeting in Moscow, only to have Putin stride in and mock the missile shield. "We may decide someday to put missile-defense systems on the moon," he said, "but before we get to that, we may lose a chance for agreement because of you implementing your own plans." Rice was restrained in response, as she long has been in public responses...
...struggle. The fourth and beyond will have the hardest go, getting pushed aside or even pecked to death if food, water and shelter become scarce. All that makes for a nasty nursery, but that's precisely the way the mother wants it. "The parents overproduce a bit," says Douglas Mock, professor of zoology at the University of Oklahoma, "maybe making one more baby than they can normally afford to raise and then letting it take the fall if the resource budget is limited...
...which ones make the cut, shedding the blossoms that are not receiving enough light or that otherwise don't seem viable. It is, for a tree, a sort of selective termination on a vast scale. "You've got 99% of the babies being thrown out by the parent," says Mock. "The tree just drops all the losers...