Word: mole
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first who has offered to drop his pants. That suggestion came after a former bookkeeper on trial for embezzlement claimed that she had had a nine-month affair with him. The bookkeeper, named Denise Sinner (yes, really), said she knew Shepherd in intimate detail -- just check for a mole in his groin area. Shepherd, a former president of the American Bar Association, denied the affair and said he was willing to submit to a physical exam. The judge rejected the offer...
...into the U.S.S.R. in 1940. As Latvian activists prepared for last week's commemoration of their lost independence, Soviet authorities sought to thwart them by trotting out an enigmatic figure from the spy wars of the 1950s: Harold ("Kim") Philby, 75, an Englishman who was the most successful Soviet mole in the British Secret Service...
Many other additions are the result of old words taking on altered meanings. RHD-II includes 75,000 new definitions reflecting this process. Where a mole . in 1966 was mainly an animal, now it is also, thanks to John le Carre, a spy who burrows into the enemy's bureaucracy. A window is not only something to gaze out but also an interval during which rockets can be launched or any opportunity seized. And in addition to all its other 1966 meanings, like has become an interjection, breaking out like acne all over adolescent speech, as in, "It's, like...
...writers, including six Nobel laureates (Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill and John Steinbeck). The gumshoe lit crit was sometimes comically inept. FBI files, for example, described the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay as possibly subversive because she used the "analogy of the mole boring under the garden...
...elegances of a well-made film like The Whistle Blower. To be sure, the paranoia that long ago settled damply around our spy dramas seems to have drifted eastward to infect Writer Julian Bond and Director Simon Langton. Their story has the British espionage establishment protecting a highly placed mole by murdering innocent, clerkish underlings in an attempt to convince its American allies that it is doing something about a leak the latter are complaining about...