Word: rub
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Somewhere in the middle, torn by good intentions and unintended consequences, fall the vast majority of people who confront the panhandlers day after day. The encounter is often frightening, always discomfiting, for Americans live in cities full of appalling contrasts: the verminous tenements rub up beside the million-dollar developments; the high-rises tower over the ghettos. It is hard for those who trip on a beggar as they leave a restaurant, where they may have just spent more on a meal than some people earn in a week, to claim that they cannot spare some change. The question, rather...
...West Egg (he was a gangster too, but he dressed better); this is New Yawk transplanted, with a lawn and a sauna. For these tough guys, upward mobility carries a hefty price tag: the pretense of a solid marriage. So a sleaze lord like Tony Russo can sign rub-out contracts but can't handle his wife Connie, played to the gritted teeth by Mercedes Ruehl...
...father gives Katie a back rub before she goes to sleep. This is no ordinary back rub. It is an imaginary exploration of people, places and things. As he draws with his fingers on her back, she guesses what the image is. He begins with rubs and pats, flips and blips. These are names Katie and Bruce invented. Then it is on to frizzlies and scritches, bumpillies and square-illies, name-illies and picture-illies, initiallies and real, which is the real back rub. When Bruce does a picture-illie, for example, his finger draws an object on her back...
...uses Greek with his aide Nick Mitropoulos when he does not want reporters to know what they are saying). His mother told Michael the Greek myths when he was a child. He thought there was something special about being a Greek, and there is. Precisely because he lacked the rub of real Greeks around him in the playground, being Greek was internalized as a concept more prescriptive than descriptive. When he first visited Greece, he was put off for a while by the gritty reality, the undisciplined actual citizens of Athens. That was not what being Greek meant...
...while serving as a policy adviser to the 1976 Carter campaign. Stuart Eizenstat, Jimmy Carter's former domestic policy adviser, is an earnest, respected economics expert. Yet when his name recently appeared as co-author of a Washington Post piece entitled "Defense Lessons for Democrats," it was enough to rub nerves. Scoffed a former Carter Administration colleague: "Is that a job application, or what...