Word: putdown
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...does. He who cannot, teaches." So goes the infamous putdown of academics. Well, some professors at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa really can. The scholars and their students have come to the rescue of a local General Motors carburetor assembly plant where 200 workers were about to lose their jobs. The automotive giant, frustrated with operating deficits at its Rochester Products Division factory, had planned to close it down. But the academics came up with a number of cost-cutting ideas that helped stem the plant's losses, and now Rochester Products is being hailed...
...competition while protecting diversity. He also supports the Administration's system of block grants, which simply transfer a sum of money to the states with no guidelines or regulations as to how it should be used. Says Bell: "Many feel our move to use block grants is a putdown to education. We feel that education is one of our highest priorities, but over the decades we had moved slowly and steadily from a federalized system to one that was nationally directed and managed. There is no question that some states were not meeting important needs in the past...
...harbor to make it a more effective base of operations for the Rapid Deployment Force. Warns one U.S. expert on Kenya: "We can take heart that the constitutional government restored order, but we can't blind ourselves to the economic problems." Neither can Moi. But in his tough putdown of the rebellion, he seemed to be signaling that Kenya's problems would be addressed by increasing authoritarianism...
Noel Coward was the master of the clipped, ice-cool putdown; George C. Scott is the master of the bristling, white-hot punchup. His voice is an explosion in a gravel pit, and he moves across the stage like a bulldozer in a china shop. Knowing that it would be folly to imitate Coward's brittle delivery and soigné manner, Scott has turned an airily sophisticated comedy into a rollicking, slambang farce...
...from then on moved through an extremely taxing schedule with grace, affability and aplomb. He read his big set speeches to members of the British Parliament and the West German Bundestag with flawless timing and resonance, and drew a laughing cheer from the Bonn politicians with a deft putdown of a solitary heckler. The man in the rue, via or Strasse could hardly help noticing that Reagan neither looked nor sounded like the crude, hip-shooting nuclear cowboy so often drawn by European caricaturists...