Word: portent
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...people. But at the same time, there will be a general humiliation of language," says Neil Postman, chairman of New York University's communications department. Our connection with the real world may grow ever more tenuous as images increasingly supplant words and symbolic gestures overwhelm rational argument. The portent is ominous: How can an electorate conditioned by MTV ever have the patience to solve the budget deficit...
...part of the world where all too often old hatreds die hard, people are pawns, and lives are meant for sacrificing. Two Germans remain imprisoned, and all accounts remain unsettled. But after all this, perhaps it is not too much to hope that last week brought a portent of peace to a waiting world tired of weeping over the opportunities it has already lost...
Sometimes its air of doomy portent is stifling. But equally often it turns into a kind of Creepshow for grownups, teasing the mind with its enigmas, bedazzling the eye with its imagery. Finally, like its villain, it draws one into a very oddly woven...
...thanks in part to the booming German economy. BMW aims to produce a record 520,000 cars this year, up 1.6% from 1989. Both companies proclaim their readiness to take on the Japanese luxury cars, but their fear is showing. "The Lexus is not a Mercedes, but as a portent of what they are able to do, it is more worrying," says John Evans, a British spokesman for Mercedes. "You ignore the Japanese at your peril...
...assembly plant in Marietta, Ga. Once bustling with workers building such military aircraft as the giant C-5 transport and the P-3 antisubmarine plane, the facility has increasingly fallen idle as Pentagon spending has ebbed. For thousands of U.S. defense contractors, the unused hangars near Atlanta are a portent of what may lie ahead for them. As the cold war wanes and the Warsaw Pact unravels, Congress and the Bush Administration have begun to plan for the most substantial reductions in military spending since the end of the Vietnam War. As they do, U.S. military suppliers from Los Angeles...