Word: moment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ceremonial addresses are laced with generalities. The trick is to pick the right ones -- and Bush did. In tone and substance, the President's Inaugural was upbeat and confident, exactly what an inherently optimistic people expects at a moment of national celebration. Jimmy Carter showed how easy it is for a leader to lose his way. "Even our great nation has its recognized limits," said Carter in his Inaugural. He was right, of course, but missed the point nonetheless. A country conditioned to being No. 1, a country that believes that by right it should...
Ronald Reagan hesitated for a moment in the cool luminance of the Oval Office, his last minutes as President ticking by. Tears welled in the eyes of the few aides who surrounded him, but Reagan was busy reaching into his coat pocket as he fished out a white laminated card...
...calmer moment, he took time out to explain the derivation of the term "linguini" to reporters--seems it comes from the Italian for "lizards' tongues...
...most of the gems date back a bit further. An early video of Rosalita, made a decade ago, has a real scruffy, low-tech charm. Springsteen quickly learned not only how to play to the camera but how to work with it as well, and you can see the moment it happened, in Brian De Palma's crafty 1984 rendering of an in-concert Dancing in the Dark. After that, Springsteen performed dazzlingly and acted well (most notably in John Sayles' splendid narrative worked around I'm on Fire). He may not be ready to hit the road to Hollywood...
...longer true, alas, that the wood-stove bore can warm himself twice, once by bragging about the money he is saving and again by preening at the perfection of his environmental posture. Heating oil, for the moment, costs less per gallon than bottled no-lead spring water. Never mind economy, however. There are congested localities such as Aspen, Colo., and Missoula, Mont., where wood burning is immoral, toxically wasteful and severely curtailed. The sweet-smelling, picturesque blue-gray smoke rising from Grandma's condo on a crisp December morning simply loads the air with too much additional junk...