Word: ragtag
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From opposite ends of the U.S., they carried on the computer industry's fiercest rivalry. Based in suburban New York, International Business Machines has long looked down on Apple Computer, dismissing it as a ragtag bunch of rabble-rousers. Miles away, in both distance and culture, Silicon Valley-based Apple (1990 revenues: $5.6 billion) attacked IBM ($69 billion) as an impersonal bureaucracy, mocking the company in TV ads as Big Brother and depicting its customers as lemmings. The warring companies forced computer users to choose sides, sometimes dividing family members against one another. Those wanting easy-to-use, almost organic...
...impossible not to feel the change in atmosphere. Intrigue, speculation and confusion abound. For more than an hour last week, the national soccer team refused to leave its field so the ragtag People's Army could parade before foreign television cameras. In private, high-ranking government officials acknowledge that there is widespread dismay and despair among Iraqis over the consequences of the nation's invasion of Kuwait. Influential citizens claim knowledge that the attack was opposed by 18 colonels and generals, as well as by several senior ministers...
...also provoked when Khomeini began calling for the overthrow of Saddam's "blasphemous" regime. He is a Sunni Muslim, though most Iraqis belong to the rival Shi'ite branch, as did Khomeini. Saddam responded by invading, confident that his powerful, Soviet-equipped army could easily smash the Ayatullah's ragtag militia, but the Iranians fought back. When the going got especially rough, Saddam turned to poison gas, a horror weapon outlawed after World...
From the inside, Ash conveys the feeling that he and the ragtag bunch of reformers are truly in Revolution Central. At the same time, he demonstrates the agitated spontaneity with which the rapid changes occurred, the wondrous transfer of power from "the castle" to the Magic Lantern...
Graduate students aren't the only people you'll overhear discussing astrophysics or Assyrian art at Out of Town News. Harvard Square harbors a ragtag community of itinerant intellectuals, secret geniuses, closet poets and conspiracy theorists who have no official connection to the University ("I'm not enrolled at Harvard, I just go there...