Word: seldom
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...boasting of gains achieved by the Soviet Union in recent years, speakers at the 25th Communist Party Congress last week almost totally ignored one impressive area of advancement: military strength. Whenever it has come to a choice between swords and plowshares, Moscow has seldom hesitated. Swords it has been. Neither bad harvests, shortages of consumer goods nor the spirit of detente with the West has braked the Soviet military buildup. In the past decade, Moscow has so expanded its forces that most defense analysts around the world agree that the U.S. is in danger of losing its strategic edge. Items...
Among the most blatant offenders are the clusters of fruit jokes which constitute one of the show's main running gags. In a world where "things are seldom what they seem to be" and real decisions are impossible, LaZebnik's emphasis on immediate satisfaction of the appetites--in this case, hunger--makes a certain kind of sense. Nevertheless, there's only so much humor to be squeezed from a pear that turns out to be someone's fiance, or from a shepherdess blowing on a banana. And what's only vaguely amusing the first time around hardly improves with repetition...
...tablets to replace the ones he had broken. Medieval monks gladly spent lifetimes copying manuscripts by hand. Photography, that most exact of reproductive processes, has since its invention in the last century been elevated to a high art. But unlike most illuminated manuscripts and some photographs, Xerox copies are seldom more interesting than their originals. The Xerox machine has taken the art out of copying, made it too easy. As a result, people are copying more now and enjoying it less. Nothing nowadays seems too trivial to be immortalized by that moving light-bar, memos of momentary importance, yesterday...
...alone. Even with women, and that's good, there is largely no companionship except for a little while." Steinbeck's third marriage, which lasted from 1950 until his death in 1067, was apparently a happy one, but he never erased the scars of his two divorces. Even though he seldom criticized ex-wives in his letters, the divorces left a residue of bitterness and skepticism that shaped his entire outlook...
...derived much happiness from his work, it seldom shows in his letters. "Words are properly the tools of loneliness and rarely fulfillment, the conveying of loss and frustration but no triumph like the closing of fingers on fingers or the pressure of knee on knee or the secret touching of feet under a table," he said. On another occasion, he remarked, "This is a lonely business. A writer should be like a surly dog with a bone, suspicious of everyone, trusting no one, loving no one. It's hard to justify such a life but that...