Word: paroxysms
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During the roaring 1980s, it appeared that New York might slip by. High finance and a booming real estate market transported New York to a paroxysm of unbridled capitalism, with all its attendant glitz and excess. At the height of the bull market, 60,000 new jobs were being created annually, luring droves of hyperambitious baby boomers to the canyons of Wall Street and midtown Manhattan. Nicknamed "the Erector set," a stable of real estate developers transformed the cityscape, throwing up 50 million sq. ft. of glistening office monoliths within Manhattan alone. New fortunes upended the city's social lineage...
...still less universal than hands and eyes. So even as we become unwitting James Joyces -- coining neologisms by the minute -- when we essay a foreign language, we also become Marcel Marceaus: asking the way to the rest room with our eyebrows or sending back the squid with a paroxysm of mock pain. Ask a man in Tierra del Fuego to point you to The Sound of Music, and he'll instantly reply, "No problem!" (which, in every language, means that your problems are just beginning). Then he'll direct you to the Julie Andrews musical that the Argentines call...
...gave way only for lulls to permit both sides to reload. Calls for a cease-fire were drowned out by the volcanic bombardments. Western officials wrung their hands and made vain appeals to reason. But the sky continued to rain fire and death on the city in a prolonged paroxysm of violence...
Overnight the savage massacre in Tiananmen Square shattered Hong Kong's wary faith in that future. Thousands donned funeral garb to mourn the dead of Beijing. The stock market plunged 22% in one day in a paroxysm of lost confidence. Chinese flocked to mainland banks to withdraw their money, as much in anger as in fear. And the largely apolitical people of this freewheeling monument to commercialism discovered a newfound political activism...
...weird political moment, even by Australia's raucous standards. There was Prime Minister Bob Hawke on national television last week, wiping a tear from his eye and telling his countrymen that yes, he had been unfaithful to Hazel, his wife of 33 years. In a paroxysm of soul baring, he reviewed his boozy past (Hawke was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for beer drinking) and his decision nine years ago to go cold turkey. "It was getting to the stage where, at the end of the day, I was looking forward too much to a drink...