Word: penchant
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...might be described as the Sicily of the Soviet Union: a warm, wine-growing land whose 5 million, mostly dark-eyed inhabitants are known far and wide as clannish, passionate and shrewd. They are also notoriously unconcerned with the principles of socialism where making money is concerned. The Georgian penchant for private enterprise has long troubled Moscow, and lately its concern has been increasing. Over the past few months, a series of fires and bombings have racked Tbilisi, the capital, and, usually in typical veiled fashion, Communist officials admit that the region's entrepreneurs are fighting fiat with fire...
...Fellini's penchant for detail is no laughing matter. Filming a Venice canal sequence in an outdoor tank, the maestro ordered 200 rats into the water. "Stop!" he shouted after noticing that half the rats were white: "Paint them brown." His hard-pressed casting staff is often given a sketch of a type of face he wants and ordered off to the back alleys of Rome in search of their prey. For Fellini, the right face is everything. "I chose Sutherland because he is completely alien to the conventional idea of Casanova-the dark-eyed Italian, magnetic, raven locks...
...late 1960s, and few have come apart so spectacularly in the 1970s. Today the company is no longer a high flyer, and Founder James J. Ling, having created and failed with another conglomerate, Omega-Alpha, is fighting stockholder fraud suits. But thanks to Ling's penchant for corporate spinoffs, parts of the old LTV have emerged to flourish as independent companies. The one with the most exotic projects is Dallas-based E-Systems Inc., a company with a meaningless name, an ultrasophisticated product line and operations that extend to such recherché places as the Sinai desert...
...been its editor in an earlier and simpler incarnation, when it was a Sunday supplement of the now defunct New York Herald-Tribune.) Regular features akin to Felker's "The Underground Gourmet" (budget-minded restaurant reviews) and "The Passionate Shopper" are staple fare, and New York's penchant for parlor-game lists ("The Ten Worst Judges," "The 100 Greatest Freebies in Town") has been widely copied. Unlike New York, which often ranges afield to cover events of national interest (last week's cover story was a profile of Jimmy Carter), other city magazines-all of them monthlies...
...asks "Fair or foul?" The reader can almost hear Diggins giggling in self-satisfied delight. Elsewhere he is simply pretentious. In an account of Buckley's attempts to reconcile Catholic theology with free-market economic precepts, Diggins intones solemnly, "Indeed conservatism, capitalism, and Christianity present an impossible synthesis." His penchant for constant alliteration, even when it requires the use of inappropriate words, is equally annoying...