Word: purlieu
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Winning it back will be a critical test of the U.S. military's surge in Baghdad. Under Saddam, Mansour and places like it--neighborhoods with names like Amariyah, Ghazaliyah, al-Adil, al-Khadra--were the purlieu of Iraq's educated Sunni élite. As security has deteriorated and sectarian killings have soared, those areas have been overrun by insurgent groups tied to al-Qaeda. The jihadists offer protection to local Sunnis against Shi'ite death squads in exchange for use of the neighborhoods to launch suicide bombings against Shi'ite civilians. But over the past few months, al-Qaeda...
Harvey has mined this territory before, but who cares? Love is a pretty expansive purlieu after all, and she's chasing anger, hate and lust too. Her lyrics aspire to poetry and sometimes get there--"It turns me on to imagine/Your blue eyes on my words" she says on The Letter--but it's her voice that does the heavy lifting. On Cat on the Wall and The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth, she howls simple phrases until they sound a little like sex and a little like pain. On The Slow Drug, her hush leads into the dead...
...lifelong Democrat, Vance is a product of the Eastern Establishment that regards foreign policy as its special purlieu. Son of an insurance executive (who was also a Democrat and who died when young Vance was five), he spent much of his boyhood in Clarksburg, W. Va., where he became friendly with John W. Davis, the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1924. "I used to browse in Mr. Davis' law library," Vance once recalled. "I remembered the smell of bound leather and those wonderfully big shelves of law books." Vance was sent to the Kent School in Connecticut...
...habitue of the Metropolitan Opera House and purlieu is bound to get a good many chuckles from Mare Simont's book, "Opera Souffle." The volume consists entirely of 60 pictures "in bravura," which is merely the opera lover's way of saying that they are all impertinently witty comments about opera and opera-lovers...
...however, a partisan political head of the Internal Revenue Department, or of a separate department created for the purpose, shall always be able through Federal detectives and policemen to reach into every hamlet, and to every ward, and to every purlieu of a large city, and use the leverage of an intermittently lax and strict enforcement of the law against would-be dealers in liquor and their patrons, he will wield a sinister power, prospect of which should make anxious the friends of free constitutional government...
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