Word: shortcutting
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Filing a federal income-tax return used to be cheap but slow: 25 cents for the stamp and as much as eight weeks for the refund check. But now most U.S. taxpayers can take a high-tech shortcut. For anywhere from $25 to $75, filers can get their money in as little as two weeks by having their return sent electronically by one of 18,000 tax preparers and transmitters. After a four- year test run, the Internal Revenue Service for the first time is making its electronic filing system available in all 50 states this year...
More seriously, this shortcut society is changing the way the family functions. Nowhere is the course of the rat race more arduous, for example, than around the kitchen table. Hallmark, that unerring almanac of American mores, now markets greeting cards for parents to tuck under the Cheerios in the morning ("Have a super day at school," chirps one card) or under the pillow at night ("I wish I were there to tuck you in"). Even parents who like their jobs and love their kids find that the pressure to do justice to both becomes almost unbearable. "As a society," warns...
...these huge, abnormally muscled beings on cartoons and kids' programming," notes Chicago osteopath Bob Goldman. "Conan and Rambo are the heroes." So are sports stars, some of whom -- like Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson and Seattle Seahawk linebacker Brian Bosworth -- are known to have taken the steroid shortcut. Scrawny youngsters, some only 13, eagerly pay between $50 and $400 to black-market dealers for a six-to-13-week cycle of pills and injectables that could turn them into Hulk Hogans. "It takes years to build up a body like that," brags "Rick," 17, pointing to drug-clean weight lifters...
...apple. The only way the fly can reach the apple's other side is the long way, over the fruit's surface. But a worm could bore a tunnel through the apple, shortening the trip considerably. A wormhole in space is the same sort of tunnel; it is a shortcut from one part of the universe to another that reduces the travel time to just about zero...
...does not quite fit that description. He gained sympathy from the remorseless media hazing he underwent immediately after it was revealed that he pulled family strings when seeking a spot in the Indiana National Guard during the Viet Nam War. That fact, coupled with his shoddy college record and shortcut into Indiana University law school, underscored his image as a coddled son of privilege. Even after eight years on the Armed Services Committee, he still mainly comes across as an avid golfer and fun-loving Deke. The large enthusiastic crowds that show up at his ; rallies are not rooting...