Word: shocker
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...painter a worse embarrassment than Salvador Dali? Not even Andy Warhol. Long before his physical death in 1989, old Avida Dollars -- Andre Breton's anagram of his name -- had collapsed into wretched exhibitionism. Genius, Shocker, Lip-Topiarist: though he once turned down an American businessman's proposal to open a string of what would be called Dalicatessens, there was little else he refused to endorse, from chocolates to perfumes. He was surrounded by fakes and crooks and married to one of the greediest harpies in Europe: Gala, who made him the indentured servant of his lost talent even...
...latest shocker comes in the current issue of Nature, where Chinese scientists have contended that the skull of a modern-looking human, found in their country a decade ago, is at least 200,000 years old -- more than twice as old as any Homo sapiens specimen ever found in that part of the world. Moreover, the skull has features resembling those of contemporary Asians. The controversial implication: modern humans may not have evolved just in Africa, as most scientists believe, but may have emerged simultaneously in several regions of the globe...
...often sleeping in chairs, as they hammered out the final details of the deal. So obsessed was Redstone with secrecy that when he arranged a board meeting, directors weren't told where they would assemble until the last minute. With only hours to spare, Viacom and Blockbuster announced a shocker: an $8.4 billion merger that would create a multimedia powerhouse with assets ranging from Viacom's MTV (home of Beavis and Butt-head) and Nickelodeon to Blockbuster's 3,500 retail stores...
...water polo co-captain Zimmerman was named to the team for the second year in a row. "It was definitely a shocker to get it last year and it was an honor again this year," he said...
...someone in this world is doing just that. In fact, somewhere in this city, there's a colony of Harvard students who've already finished 10 pages of their theses, and have already published them in The New Yorker and The Nation and People. And for the disbeliever, this shocker: this isn't a neurotic nightmare--here at Harvard, we lazies have met the enemy, and it is the overachieve. When we return to school and read that they've already won the Hoopes, the rest of us will sink back in despair...