Word: precious
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Plan. Despite all the lofty rhetoric that prevailed in the House chamber this week, the chances of bringing peace and democracy to Nicaragua, a country that has never known either, remain slim. Forty years of Somoza rule and another eight of a communist regime have left the country with precious little democratic institutions and heritage...
Coming back to Boston Sunday night, I had that awful morning-after feeling that comes from a combination of guilt and alcohol poisoning. True, I had escaped the city that spawned Michael Dukakis for three precious days. True, in that time the thermometer had risen back into the positive numbers. But somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered if I had lived up to my obligations. Might I have tried just a little bit harder to wring a few more drops of alcohol from the mini-bar? Might I have pressed a little bit harder for an expense...
...opened the minds of the mainstream to nonliteral ways of telling a story. Unlike the domestic tragedy of Williams and Miller and O'Neill, Our Town took the sweeping view that a misspent life is not a pitiable exception but a lamentable norm. Life, Wilder argued, is almost too precious to be wasted on the living, who fritter it away in trivialities...
...apple pie as an American icon. Before skin flicks and magazines became commonplace, National Geographic offered generations of boys their first opportunity to ogle bare-breasted women -- though the breasts were almost always African or Asian, rarely Caucasian. Even today the magazine is squirreled away each month like precious treasure by many of the society's 10.5 million members, who boast floor- sagging collections and trade back copies until they are tattered...
...obscuring motives from themselves and one another. The humor of their humorlessness is often Chekhovian, and the flow of Allen's camera and cutting, together with the elegance of Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's light, grants them a certain grace and dignity. But sometimes the members of this precious circle are too glibly elucidated; other times they are backed away from silently. In September, Allen is sketching when he means to be etching...