Word: scylla
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doubt Gorbachev made mistakes. No doubt his maneuvering between the Scylla of a totalitarian regime and the Charybdis of democratic ideas was far from irreproachable. No doubt he listened to and trusted the wrong people, no doubt his hearing and sight were dulled by the enormous pressure and he made many crude, irreversible mistakes. But maybe not. In a country accustomed to the ruler's answering for everything, even burned stew and spilled milk are held against the Czar and are never forgiven. Similarly, shamanism has always been a trait of the Russian national character: we cough and infect everyone...
...children's TV producer. "It's Gene Roddenberry's vision that I agreed to uphold." The job is trickier than it might seem. Berman, a vice president at Paramount when Roddenberry tapped him as the producer of The Next Generation, has had to sail his enterprise between the Scylla of Roddenberry's own "prime directive" -- a stricture against any conflict among members of Starfleet -- and the Charybdis of mass-market appeal...
...conjunction of cinemaspeak and jargonese can lead only to the gradual separation of the hemispheres of our brains, and an aching descent into complete madness. For they all say the same: we are what we speak; our language--its metaphors, implicit value judgments--inform our personalities. Caught between the Scylla of cliche and the Charybdis of suffix, our future personalities cannot but disintegrate into a stewing pot of confusion, from which we yearn to return to the wordlessness of the womb...
Between this Scylla and Charybdis, mirror designers are charting a variety of bold, new courses. By designing the Keck Telescope mirror as a mosaic of small segments, each the size of a dining-room table, astronomer Jerry Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley was able to make his mirrors both rigid and thin. But to provide images of pinprick sharpness, each segment must be kept perfectly aligned with its neighbors, a task handled by an elaborate electronic network...