Word: olympian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Alone among public institutions, the U.S. Supreme Court has remained an Olympian myth: nine sages in black robes, unelected, unreviewable, pronouncing the last word on the law. Throughout its 190-year existence, the court's decision-making process has enjoyed a special immunity from public scrutiny. Even during the '70s, in the post-Watergate era of full disclosure, its white marble temple stood as a sanctuary, its inner workings Washington's last well-kept secret...
...deteriorating mood has forced Giscard to modify his Olympian stance. "The feeling of Frenchmen can be characterized by three attitudes: discontent, doubt and worry," he admitted on national television. Even as he spoke, that discontent was being aggravated by new government austerity bites: a punishing jump of a full percentage point in employees' social security contributions and increases in the government-controlled prices of items ranging from rail and air tickets to cigarettes and gasoline (to $2.75 per gal.). Charged Georges Séguy, head of the Communist-dominated C.G.T. union: "This is not austerity, it's plunder...
...high point of the season, however, came at the Kendall Classic when Beckford finished second only to Olympian Francie Larrieu, lowering her mile time to 4:41--almost 34 seconds faster than the Harvard record set at 5:15.4 by Sarah Linsley...
...earlier books. The seventh is Lady Amherst, a fiftyish British widow who has fetched up on the Eastern Shore as a visiting lecturer at a jerk water Maryland college. As the new girl in the book, she commands initial attention and then numbed disbelief. It is not just her Olympian long-windedness that is troubling, but the things she writes. She describes sex with her lover (another correspondent): " 'Appen I enjoy it (as, despite all and faute de mieux, I sometimes do), bully for me; 'appen I don't, it up wi' me knees and nightie...
...mellowed, certainly not in the way that some Eastern intellectuals of the '30s and '40s did when they moved West to become hot-tub philosophers. McCarthy, fortunately, lives in Paris, where a sharp critical intelligence is as prized as a set of newly honed kitchen knives. Her Olympian view has also remained keen...