Word: penchant
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...Engineers added a plastic plate beneath the shifter to prevent spilled coffee and other flotsam from falling into the mechanism and gumming it up. It's a minor change, but no one is treating it that way, least of all Chung, a hard-nosed, detail-oriented boss with a penchant for micromanagement. ("He still makes the decision on how big a Christmas tree to put in the lobby," quips one former Hyundai executive.) After eyeballing the plastic plate from several angles, Chung demands, "Is this enough?" He's worried that the gizmo won't do its job. Finally, he nods...
Henze's The English Cat was first performed in Germany in 1983 and is now presented in America in English. Henze, one of the leading contemporary opera composers, has suppressed his penchant for blatant politicization to produce a subtle, cautionary fable. Bond's libretto tells the story of a pacifist band of petit bourgeois cats who have formed the Royal Society for the Protection of Rats and have been rearing a young orphan mouse. The plot concerns the ill-starred triangle of Tom (Baritone Scott Reeve), Minette (Soprano Inga Nielsen) and her husband Lord Puff (Tenor Michael Myers). Seeing...
...societies, the erotic kinks of foot-bound "sing-song girls," and the power of opium in a culture in which at least one Chamber of Commerce used the drug as the official standard of exchange. To his appetite for low company Seagrave adds an urbane taste for incongruity, a penchant for Edwardian epigrams ("There is a time for fools to come forth, when only bandits can be kings") and a gift for painterly description: Taiwan is a realm of "cliff-lined seascapes and misty peaks that unrolled each dawn from the scroll of night...
...sharp sense of legislative tactics. His gutsy advocacy of severe cuts in politically sacred programs, ranging from school lunches to farm subsidies to military pensions, was often labeled draconian and infuriated members of both parties. Also unsettling, particularly to the President, was the blunt and brilliant Budget Director's penchant for candor, which arose from his loyalty to what he considered to be the truth, as embodied in facts and figures, rather than to ideological nostrums...
...some of the criticisms are entirely valid. Reagan's highly conservative speechwriters, led by Patrick Buchanan, have been indulging the President's penchant for oratorical excess to a damaging extent. Before her husband's surgery, Nancy Reagan complained about the speechwriting operation during a private talk with Donald Regan, who conceded that tighter editing was required. Who will do it is the question. Regan has no time and little sensitivity to seek out nuances. There is no other senior aide with both the authority and the keen judgment to wield a blue pencil as effectively as Richard Darman, now Deputy...