Word: neutral
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Rebels. Their first big mistake was trying to persuade Noriega to retire peacefully instead of killing him or handing him over to the U.S. Their second was counting on Major Francisco Olechea, commander of the elite Battalion 2000, to be neutral; instead, he brought his troops to Noriega's rescue. The widow of the slain coup leader Major Moises Giroldi called Olechea a turncoat. Some U.S. officials, however, suspect that Olechea switched sides because he did not get timely assurances that Giroldi and his troops had succeeded in capturing Noriega. He waited for more than two hours after he knew...
Last night, Vincent announced that the Series will be resumed next Tuesday at Candlestick Park. Not moving the Series away from the Bay Area is the best decision baseball could make. So the Series has to wait a few more days. It should. Moving it to a neutral site may have been a faster and easier way to get back on track, but it would have just been another blow to Bay Area residents...
Mindless Nitpicking Dept.: What does Lehigh University have against women? Nothing, really. But an unexplained quirk in the athletic coupon book seems to imply that females were not welcome at the Harvard v. Lehigh football game. The coupons for every other game announce, in p.c. gender-neutral language, that students must present the signed coupon "with a Harvard identification card." The Lehigh game, for some reason, was open only to those with a coupon "signed by the owner, with his bursar's card...
...history to overcome. Until very recently, every party to the transaction bore the scars of its language: "promiscuous," "barren," "illegitimate." When adoption professionals called a woman the natural mother, it left adoptive parents in a semantic dilemma. Were they unnatural parents? The techno-jargony "birth mother" was the more neutral alternative. All the secrecy reinforced the shame: as recently as the 1970s, some delivery-room nurses covered the mirrors and draped towels in front of a woman giving up her child, or even blindfolded her, so she could not see the baby. In the nursery the infants were marked...
Some of these circuits are long and slow, so that consequences may take years or generations to manifest themselves. That helps sustain the cowboy myth that nature is a neutral, unchanging backdrop. Moreover, evolution seems to have wired our brains to respond to rapid changes, the snap of a twig or a movement in the alley, and to ignore slow ones. When these consequences do start to show up, we don't notice them. Anyone who has ever been amazed by an old photograph of himself or herself can attest to the merciful ignorance of slow change, that is, aging...