Word: portentions
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...wonder that the camera is so kind. The eyes have always had it, and Bowie has always been as successful with a lens as a microphone. His appearance in The Man Who Fell to Earth was both a dissection of the Bowie mythology to that point and a portent of the bleak direction it was about to take. Oshima's Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, to be released in America in the fall, casts Bowie for the first time in a heroic mold, as a neurotic but noble British P.O.W. in Java during World War II. Bowie is graceful and compelling...
...sense, the figure held more political than economic portent. After all 10.1% was a far cry from the depths of the Depression; in 1933, 24.9% of the labor force was out of work. But as a political rallying point, 10% is a memorably round number, a bench mark of national economic distress that Democrats hope and Republicans fear might turn voters agains the G.O.P. in the elections...
During the Middle Ages, the ancient sanctity of salt slid toward superstition. The spilling of salt was considered ominous, a portent of doom. (In Leonardo da Vinci's painting The Last Supper, the scowling Judas is shown with an overturned saltcellar in front of him.) After spilling salt, the spiller had to cast a pinch of it over his left shoulder because the left side was thought to be sinister, a place where evil spirits tended to congregate...
...accident could not have come at a more awkward time for the nuclear-power industry, already under attack for its spotty safety record. What is worse, the Ginna mishap may be a portent of troubles ahead, since steam lines in many plants around the country are also plagued by corrosion. Indeed, by week's end, reactors in New Jersey and Vermont had been shut down because of leaks in their plumbing, and the NRC reported that plans to restart Three Mile Island's Unit No. 1, closed for refueling at the time of the 1979 accident...
...having to retreat from his promise of a balanced budget by 1984, finding the recession worse than his economists had anticipated, and being unable to silence his quarreling foreign policy makers, offhandedness was not enough. Among columnists, critics were getting sharper and sympathizers uneasy, often a portent of troubles to come. Anthony Lewis called the conduct of foreign policy "a national joke"; William Safire regretfully accused Reagan of losing touch with reality. Like many survivors of Nixon's Washington, Safire was concerned about a tendency, new to Reagan but not to Presidents in general, to blame the press when...