Word: sheerly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Sheer contagious panic aside, for most people the immediate motive probably was to escape the fighting, to keep from getting caught in a murderous crossfire. For a variety of reasons, many South Vietnamese had cause to fear their own armed forces. After ARVN abandoned one town last month, the South Vietnamese air force promptly flattened the place with bombs. In city after city, marooned South Vietnamese troops were running wild. A British diplomat noted: "The civilian refugees have as much to fear from the vanquished soldiers as they do from the victors...
...lassitude, however, is so pervasive now, from the Oval Office to Capitol Hill, that one wonders if we have entered the era in which the sheer size of Government has rendered it incapable of responding to the nation's needs...
Hence the cinema of the extreme, with visual effects and emotions so exaggerated that sheer volume is all that counts. Destroy Los Angeles; film a twelve-year-old girl masturbating with a crucifix: wallow in solitary confinement with Steve McQueen on Devil's Island--ten million dollar's worth of a dark screen. a few cockroaches, and no talking. I remember last summer, caught in a miserable little movie called The Terminal Man (from Michael Crichton, with George Segal), finding myself watching the Man (who has an alien machine brain lobotomized into his skull so that his actions are uncontrollable...
...Treasury's No. 2 man. At the height of the Arab oil embargo in December 1973, President Nixon named him to create the Federal Energy Office. Simon snapped out quick and crisp decisions on allocations, conservation measures and prices. There were some foulups, but Simon by sheer force of personality convinced Washington that someone had taken charge of what had been a confused energy policy...
...time, much of this seemed sheer perversity, a quixotic desire to be history's odd man out. But the truth of Orwell's observations slowly vindicated him. The writer was first characterized as a crank, then as an apostle of common sense, and at last, in V.S. Pritchett's phrase, "as the wintry conscience of a whole generation...