Word: plainness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...gone to elaborate lengths to apply political and psychological pressure to the participants, pushing them to cut a deal. The plain fluorescent lights and the faint stains in the rug at the conference center made it clear that the Hope Hotel was no Versailles or Vienna but a place to do business, pure and simple. The leaders were given identical accommodations-- identical suites furnished with identical desks, identical lampshades and identically colored towels. This arrangement carried the message that the three men enjoyed equal status and that they bore equal responsibility to resolve their differences...
Representative Bob Stump, Republican from Arizona and chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, calls the charge that Congress has balanced the budget on the backs of veterans "just plain mean, disgraceful." He argues that a declining veteran population, coupled with streamlined management and reform of the arcane eligibility rules that keep veterans' hospitals from delivering care in the most efficient way, should enable the VA to maintain its level of service. "Without a balanced federal budget," he adds, "rising interest payments on the national debt would soon crowd out our ability to continue providing for the nation's veterans...
...than popular secular fiction. Other differences are hard to miss. Sex is not allowed below the eyes. (Fraught gazes carry great weight here, not only conveying love and affection but also standing in for dialogue in dicey situations.) There are no curses or smut, of course, but also no plain-spoken nouns and verbs denoting body parts or functions. Above all, no humor. No jokes, no kidding, no double meanings, no quirks and certainly no irony...
Gardeners in Jamaica Plain are protesting the proposed construction of a new education center for Harvard's Arnold Arboretum which could displace the nine-year-old South Street Community Garden...
...publishing genre--the confessional memoir. More than 200 years later the literary form is thriving. Not just the celebrity memoir in which show-biz and sports icons "tell all" about the pain behind the fame. More recently has come a flood of what might be called just-plain-folks memoirs--intensely personal yet highly literary accounts by noncelebrities about growing up in badly disturbed families, hiding terrible childhood secrets, overcoming severe psychological traumas--and exorcising it all by writing about...