Word: sceptered
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...number composing them may be, the fewer will be the men who will in fact direct their proceedings." Madison went on to observe that in the earliest republics, a single orator or an artful statesman was generally seen to rule with as complete a sway as if a scepter had been placed in his single hand...
...Wood's sister Nan and a Cedar Rapids dentist named McKeeby. The subject of American Gothic is in fact a small-town Midwesterner and his unmarried daughter, and once this is seen, the details of the painting fall into shape, as Wood meant them: the pitchfork becomes a scepter of paternal authority, a weapon for fending off suitors and perpetuating spinsterhood; its shape is echoed in the limp seams of the man's overalls, foreshadowing his own masculine debility; and so forth...
...Criminals now rule the streets of our cities and towns, and the handgun is their scepter," he said, voicing support for a Senate bill which would ban the sale of handguns with barrel length less than three inches...
After Galileo announced the wonders revealed by his new optical marvel -among them the mountains and valleys of the moon-many of his contemporaries were overwhelmed. The great German astronomer Johannes Kepler called Galileo's spy glass "more precious than any scepter! He who holds thee in his right hand is a true king, a world ruler." With the space telescope, his successors may be moved to echo that exultation. -By Frederic Golden
Back to the Brits. The Queen having recovered nicely from the recent unpleasantness, another Arab-directed group now plans to pinch a property of inestimably greater material value to the scepter'd isle. In The Samson Strike by Tony Williamson (Atheneum; 250 pages; $9.95), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine sets out to capture a vast oil platform in the North Sea that can pump 400,000 bbl. a day from its undersea wells. Unless the terrorists win the release of all political prisoners in Europeplus ?57 millionthey will waste the $400 million...