Word: rubes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...idioms used by 40% of twins because they feel lonely or playful or both. Twins usually give it up at age three. But Gracie and Ginny were discovered at six, still unable to speak English. They had an apparent vocabulary of hundreds of exotic words stuck together in Rube Goldberg sentence structures and salted with strange half-English and half-German phrases. The preposition out became an active verb: "I out the pudatoo-ta" (I throw out the potato salad). Potato could be said in 30 different ways. Linguists, speech pathologists and educators hoped the twins' private communication would...
...although some agree with the Republicans that it would allow an unwarranted intrusion by the Government into hospital affairs. The G.O.P. also sees the bill as a wedge to open the way for price controls in other industries. Contends Republican Congressman David Stockman of Michigan: "It is a classic Rube Goldberg legislative contraption that will be impossible to implement and virtually make Califano the hospital czar...
Propellers? The swanboats, heaven forbid, aren't powered by engine. But there are propellers, turned by young men strapped into bicycle-like setups in the rear of the boats. And in case the boat sounds like some Rube Goldberg get-up, rest assured that all the machinery is hidden inside a giant wooden swan that sits really at the stern...
...plumbing goes, nuclear power plants exceed Rube Goldberg's wildest fantasies. The basic idea sounds simple-unstable heavy atoms, like those of uranium 235, break up (fission). Scattered in all directions are electrically neutral particles called neutrons as well as fission products such as shortlived radioactive xenon, krypton and iodine. The neutrons hit still other atoms like errant billiard balls in a chain reaction that produces heat. But obtaining useful energy from this process can be extremely complex. Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant has two pressurized water reactors. Such reactors are based on a design pioneered...
Sponsors of the tax cuts intend them to help balance the federal budget, but leading Democrats called the plan "a Rube Goldberg scheme" that would cripple Congress's economic policy-making powers...