Word: plain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...months later, Bill Clinton was an instant has-been. In one of the truly stunning upsets of 1980, Democrat-turned-Republican Frank White, a plain-speaking banker and political novice, defeated the Wunderkind, 435,684 to 403,241. The main reason: voters had been alienated by Clinton's hifalutin ambitions...
...smart newlyweds of a generation ago, their home, the first rung on the ladder of upward mobility, was almost inevitably furnished with "Danish modern," complete with Marimekko textiles, stainless-steel cutlery and plain white tableware. There was no better way to show modernity. Recently, however, modern Scandinavian design seems to have vanished from public awareness in the U.S. Much of it has been poorly adapted and absorbed by U.S. mass culture. In addition, it is no longer modern to be modern...
...particular attention, suddenly had a field day with the methods the students used to try to drive their affirmative action message home. Before the summer was over, the Black law students found themselves labeled by the national media as "unwise," "rampant" with "banal ethnocentrism," "anti intellectual," and just plain "racist...
...country like this one, with its lust for liberty, for room to move. By locking a criminal away, a community achieves retribution as well, a theoretical function of the U.S. penal system. Prisons also keep criminals off the streets for a while. Yet, oddly, this most successfully realized purpose?plain detention?has been usually regarded as almost incidental to prison's higher, far more problematic purposes. The loftiest and most desperately sought of these is rehabilitation, originally to be accomplished by religious conversion, and later by psychology...
...prison will punish. Some people fear that prisons are now too cushy, so spiffed up that chastisement is nullified. But the "country club prison" is as unreal as the prison cum treatment center. A plain deprivation of freedom?the average prisoner serves two years or so?is quite severe all by itself. Conjugal visits between inmates and spouses, the innovation so often cited as alarmingly humane, are permitted in only nine states. More typical of prison permissiveness is allowing Playboy pinups in cells and unlimited seconds on Wonder bread in the chow lines...