Word: quaintly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Certainly, there is a case to be made for this. Honorifics are basically dead. The idea of agonizing over "Ms." seems quaint because the idea of calling anybody "Mister" or "Missus" or indeed anything other than "Hey, you" has faded away. Go into Abercrombie & Fitch, and the teenage sales clerks read your name off your credit card like you were both going to Riverdale High together...
There's no way around it. The longer hours and extra fuel are necessary in order, as one ambitious undergraduate put it, to max out one's opportunities. The occasional all-nighter--that quaint relic of the past--seems as pass as the typewriter...
...permit ourselves a divergence, of some thousands of miles, to Australia (that quaint, puzzling country that just voted overwhelmingly to keep their Queen), the Pauline Hanson phenomenon provides an illuminating analogy. Hanson--the red-headed fish-and-chip shop lady--shows what can happen to right-wing extremists unhinged from a main-stream party machine. Hanson came to fame in 1996 with her maiden speech in the House of Representatives, shattering the "political correctness" consensus of the last decade and rocketing herself to political infamy. She then went on to the form the (somewhat ironically titled) One Nation Party...
...Germany, my family lived in a quaint Bavarian hostel overlooking mountains which would impress even the Ricola house band. Each morning, we would sit to a breakfast of cereal with milk from a cow we could see through the window, bread with cheese made in the neighboring town and conversation topped with the mindless thumping of music from home. Our hosts, Christoph and Jutta, were warm country folk, with an agreeable predisposition to sausage and beer, but, alas, an ugly fetish for American music...
...backgrounds, often learn as much over dinner and wine tastings at professors' houses as they do in the classroom. But it may also reflect the fact that males are a fashionable subject again. The men's movement, and the rise of male-simpatico feminists like Susan Faludi, have lent quaint Wabash a hip cachet. "An important liberal-arts ideal is 'Know thyself,'" says Wabash president Andrew Ford. "Sometimes you can do that best, or more comfortably, among your own gender, and we offer that choice...