Word: rustication
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Pattengill hears that a house a few doors down is ablaze, but his split- level on Wendt Terrace is still untouched. A bowl of apples and bananas sits spotless on a kitchen counter. Unfortunately, like many homes in a town proud of its rustic flavor, Pattengill's is made of wood. Within minutes, his tennis shoes can be heard trudging the roof, accompanied by a slight hiss of water. Then he comes down again. "There's hardly any water pressure," he laments, a fact that has been hampering official fire fighters all day. Outside on his patio, an ember alights...
Doerr breathes vitality into a flat-tire genre. The past few years have positively seethed with charming, Toujours Provence-like depictions of the rustic life of those quaint foreign folk. Authors tend to subscribe to the crude narrative conventions of culture clash and nation of contrasts, where faraway lands seduce the reader with their irrational, undeveloped, unhurried, unchanging, quintessentially un-Western ways. And readers, doubtless locked in urban sprawl and economic recession, have lapped up such escapist literature with alacrity...
...accounts was a world-class harridan, once told a friend in her employee's hearing, "Well, I see the little Irish girl has set out the wrong dinner plates again." Mahoney's reaction was classic. "The remark -- which amounted to an epithet -- conjured images of a feckless, carrot-topped rustic with a camel's long lashes and a blush that traveled from throat to freckled hairline, awash in a sea of plates the likes of which she had never had the privilege to be confused by before...
...dimensions are not what these poor, deceived purists like most about the new ballpark. They romanticize about its placement in the middle of Baltimore's rustic harbor district. Sixty feet on the other side of the right field fence stands the 94-year-old B & O warehouse, the longest building on the East Coast and the ballpark's signature piece...
...good deal of hypocrisy in this anti- Washington chatter. Much of it comes from politicians and journalists who have spent most of their adult lives in Washington and wouldn't care to live anywhere else. They are not rushing to West Virginia themselves, except for the occasional quaint rustic weekend. But they can take comfort that public servants at the Bureau of the Public Debt, at least, have escaped the perils of inside-the-Beltway insularity...