Word: punctilio
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ollie North's world is still a frontier (Latin America, the Middle East) where savages and terrorists wander. Something in Americans sympathizes with that view of the world, with a bit of Teddy Roosevelt roughriding and a distaste for legal punctilio. In Texas lore there is a defense for homicide that goes like this: "He needed killing." Case dismissed...
...ceremonies were done with crisp military punctilio-which was not the way that Viet Nam went at all. The men in the honor guard wore dress uniforms and skinhead haircuts and composed their young faces into masks of abstracted obedience. Like robots suffering an obscure sorrow, they carried the casket of the new Unknown Soldier, the one from Viet Nam. They laid him to rest last week at Arlington National Cemetery beside those from the two World Wars and Korea...
Negotiations can be merely a smokescreen, of course: like the bargaining that the Japanese were conducting with the U.S. before Pearl Harbor. Sometimes negotiations are only empty dances of punctilio: at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it took the delegates six months to decide in what order they would enter and be seated in the negotiating chamber; the U.S. and North Viet Nam held similarly intricate discussions about the shape of the table in Paris. Negotiations can produce their own tragedies, as Versailles did, as Yalta did. But without negotiation, things tend to fall more quickly of their...
...analysts cautiously awaited voting results from their 7,000 sample precincts, NBC executives decided to use their exit polls as a basis for calling many states rather than wait for any real vote counts. NBC'S reasoning: in a landslide, there is no place for punctilio...