Word: quack
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite its post-budget bill voguishness, the line-item veto will not become a reality anytime soon. "It is something that neither this President nor any other President should have," says Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd. "It is a quack nostrum." As House Majority Leader Thomas Foley of Washington has suggested, the deficit crisis is essentially a matter of willpower. The White House, the Congress and the American public must decide together to make the sacrifices necessary to reduce the deficit. Until that time, ideas like the line-item veto will remain irrelevant oldies...
...grounds and got amorous in the swimming pool. Then some wood ducks decided to raise their young ones in the crotch of a huge ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) down on the South Lawn, led them to frolic in the fountain, then sent them off to the wilds with a quack...
Paul Johnson balefully examined the 20th century in Modern Times (1983). What he found in the barbaric follies of the nation-state and the quack logic of Marxism and fascism was a desecration of the rational tradition he now celebrates in A History of the Jews. Johnson navigates from a fixed position: that the People of the Book reasoned their way to monotheism and so invented Western thought. A thirst for first causes and a moral universe led to ethics and law that the Hebrews codified and refined in the Torah and the Talmud...
...heights? Dijkstra offers conflicting scapegoats. One is the rise of industrial capitalism, which made such physical and moral demands that men fled, exhausted, to the image of woman as "priestess of virtuous inanity." The other, which explains the failure of such canonization, is the spread of Darwinism and the quack argument that women remained at a more primitive stage of evolution. As Darwin himself put it, "Man has ultimately become superior to woman...
...want to buy this duck. The movie is too scuzzy to beguile children, too infantile to appeal to adults. Its humor is sub-Mad: Howard (played by Actor Ed Gale, and some other small people, in a duck suit, with Chip Zien providing the voice) is a master of "quack fu" who reads Rolling Egg and DQ magazines. He grows angry: "No more Mr. Nice Duck." He waxes philosophic: "No duck is an island." When the filmmakers grow tired of fowl puns -- about an hour after the audience does -- they switch to space opera, and Howard battles a scientist (Jeffrey...