Word: nadir
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...fighter finally gets a big match mostly because he and his owner are so cute and publicizable when they scream at each other in the ring. This leads to the movie's nadir, a training camp sequence in which we are asked to believe that a competent, liberated woman of our time would passively accept living quarters in an open dormitory populated entirely by the fighter's all-male staff. Streisand is, if anything, less attractive when she goes all cute and kittenish than when she is being strident and pushy...
...change in attitude between the city and Harvard didn't occur overnight, but 1978-79, at least to some, was the nadir of their relationship. "I've never seen Harvard-Cambridge relations worse, longtime city manager James L. Sullivan said in early winter. "Nothing has happened since to change my mind," he added last week...
...World War I, the Ottoman Empire had been dismembered and large portions of it brought under the domination of the colonizing nations of Christian Europe. European rule demonstrated how important it was for Islam to exercise temporal as well as spiritual power. At its nadir, in all the Arab world, only Yemen and Saudi Arabia, poor and backward, were nominally independent. Iran, Afghanistan and secularized Turkey, where Kemal Ataturk had disestablished Islam as his country's official religion in an effort to forge a stable and progressive nation, were free. But elsewhere?on the Indian subcontinent, in Southeast Asia...
...attitude toward women's roles. But demographics play a further part. Because of the sharp drop in the U.S. birth rate in the 1960s, the number of 18-year-old males will peak at 2.1 million next year, fall to 2 million in 1983 and hit its projected nadir of 1.7 million in 1988. These projections threaten the military with a shortage of qualified men. The armed services will have to offer increasingly costly incentives to attract educated and motivated volunteers. Otherwise the draft may have to be reinstated, which would be politically difficult, if not impossible...
...late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Borgia family brought the papacy to its nadir. After the death of the notorious Alexander VI in 1503, Cardinal Sforza succeeded in frustrating Borgia ambitions by having decrepit Cardinal Piccolomini elected Pius III. Rapacious Vatican bureaucrats, accustomed to plundering the apartments of every new Pope on the assumption that the Holy Father would need no further worldly goods, so stripped Pius' cell that he even had to buy back the bed in which he died of gout just 25 days later...