Word: phrase
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...familiar tale. What Dora wants and needs most is reliable electricity and water. Yet Hamad says not a single government official has shown up in Dora while he has worked here. "Our officials only care about themselves," he said, in the sort of resigned phrase that should depress any U.S. leader. "They are only in power for four years so they make as much money as they can and then plan to flee the country. What we need is a dictator...
...Where the City Came From Your skimmer item on Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates [Oct. 20] states that the phrase "city on a hill" was coined by John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts. Not so. Winthrop was quoting Jesus' Sermon on the Mount: "[The righteous] are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden" (Matthew 5:14). Nathaniel Jewell, Adelaide, South Australia...
...with no particular agenda, just a feeling in the post-Watergate era that Hawaii's government needed to be more accountable to its people. Nevertheless, it resulted in 34 separate amendments - more than 1,000 individual changes to Hawaii's state constitution - that included the addition of the untranslated phrase, "Ua mau ke ea o ka 'aina i ka pono" in the constitution's preamble - "The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness." It was a sweeping victory for Native Hawaiian rights and culture...
...cited a love for learning and a commitment to tikkun olam—a Hebrew phrase meaning “repairing of the world”—as shared values that helped bring them together...
...with powerful imagery. He need only call up a few simple, well-placed nouns and his scene is clear. He takes this idea the furthest in a two-part poem that lists the things that divide man to show the consequences of these divisions. Each terse one-word phrase becomes packed with meaning, emphasizing the divided nature of the concepts they represent: “Grid / coordinates. Maps. Longitude. Latitude. Property lines drawn / in unconsecrated dust.” War is both a calculated affair deployed from a bunker and a personal conflict between two neighbors...