Word: perilousness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...centuries, the idea that the federal debt would be the ruin of America was among the nation's great political hobgoblins -- right up there with the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril. Public indebtedness, said Thomas Jefferson, who spent $27,267,622 of the national treasure to purchase Louisiana, is "the greatest danger to be feared." Herbert Hoover, whose policies helped usher in the Great Depression, declared that "government borrowing . . . is a device to load our extravagance and waste onto the next generation." Eventually, though, as Armageddon kept getting postponed and new generations thrived, the issue receded into the more...
...YEARS AUDIENCES HAVE CRIED AT THE SIGHT OF the undersized lad bearing a single crutch who rides atop his father's shoulder. But Charles Dickens never revealed just what is wrong with Tiny Tim Cratchit, whose life is in chronic peril each Christmas. American pediatric neurologist Donald Lewis apparently couldn't take it anymore. After examining the literature, literally, on Tim, Dr. Lewis has come up with a professional diagnosis: distal renal tubular acidosis. According to A Christmas Carol, Tiny Tim lives to enjoy Christmases Yet to Come, thanks to a reformed Scrooge and his trio of conscience-raising phantoms...
...fair, no other department releases its budget figures, either. And this is the crux of a larger issue: The administration expects students and other members of the community to accept budget cuts during times of financial peril, like now. From the History Department to the Russian Research Center to intramural sports, everyone's got to hurt a little. Fine...
...concern has no logical stopping point, but the world's attention is hard to capture. It is easy to argue that policymakers should not wait for gruesome television footage before they respond. But if images like these are what it takes to bring mercy to even one people in peril...
...Chernobyl is hardly reassuring. When workers finished the huge steel-and-concrete shell that entombs the intensely radioactive mass of the shattered No. 4 reactor in late 1986, Soviet officials declared the site safe for at least 30 years. Yet today the sarcophagus is cracked, crumbling and in peril of a disastrous collapse. The melted-down fuel is turning to unstable dust. Contaminated objects are being smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone. Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure...