Word: neutral
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...finding ruses to communicate with safety. "Everybody we talked to was afraid of being killed," says Gwynne. In hotels from Washington to Abu Dhabi, Beaty often had to leave his room in the early morning to return calls from telephone booths. He persuaded several sources to meet him on neutral ground in Casablanca, and learned more details there while dining on fish and rice in a Bedouin's tent. Beaty came right up against the sinister underside of the story when a man from the black network invited himself into Beaty's hotel room in Abu Dhabi and threatened...
...added essay, Avoiding Sexist Language, offers some useful gender-neutral suggestions (firefighter instead of fireman). Yet browsers will find as well the stamp of acceptance on the dreadful herstory ("an alternative form to distinguish or emphasize the particular experience of women"); the execrable womyn ("alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequence m-e-n"); and the absurd wait-person (waiter or waitress) and waitron ("a person of either sex who waits on tables"). Future lexicons, perhaps, will give us waitoid (a person of indeterminate sex who waits on tables...
LANGUAGE A new dictionary is gender neutral but not word perfect...
...there's another reason for Baker's frenetic shuttling -- the securing of George Bush's re-election in 1992. Many American Jews harbor an inchoate but visceral belief that while Ronald Reagan and George Shultz were seen as instinctive friends of Israel, Bush and Baker are at best neutral toward the Jewish state. "We've reinforced that perception with a series of statements viewed as unfairly squeezing Israel," concedes a State Department official, "but if we can generate even a little progress -- or just the appearance of progress -- the hostility should fade...
...accord that the U.S. and its allies did not so much as pause in their efforts to establish a safe haven for the Kurds in northern Iraq. Said a U.S. official about the agreement: "We can't welcome it. We can't pooh-pooh it. So we're extremely neutral." However, if the detente reached in Baghdad sticks, it may yet serve the allies' interests. If a final pact prompts the displaced Kurds to return to their homes, it would relieve the allies of the enormous difficulties they face in trying to aid the refugees without becoming entangled with Baghdad...