Word: shorthands
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...renewed interest? One word: Vélib. Paris launched the Vélib program a year ago, and while très cheap (its name is French shorthand for "free bike"), it's actually not free. Although places like Copenhagen, Lyons and Barcelona are big on bike-sharing, the City of Lights boasts the crème de la crème, with 20,600 bikes and about 1,450 stations--four times the number of Parisian metro stops. It's hard to walk more than two blocks without running into a bike rack, which helps explain why the program has already yielded...
Swift-boat is shorthand for the brilliant, despicable Republican campaign strategy in 2004 that turned John Kerry's honorable service in Vietnam into a negative factor in his campaign. The phrase has become more broadly the term for a particular category of campaign tactics and has even become a verb. To "swift-boat" somebody is to use these tactics against him or her. If you remember the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign and don't see anything wrong with it--or if you believe it was the work of "independent" operatives unconnected to George W. Bush's campaign...
...story to every object they sell. "If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people--whether they admit it to pollsters or even fully understand it themselves--to consume the idea by consuming the product," he writes. "A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand...
...impression of American weakness. To punctuate the point, McCain persistently barks that Obama wants to meet with the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a flagrant anti-Semite but a relatively powerless figurehead. Obama did say during a debate last summer that he would meet with foreign leaders without preconditions. "He shorthanded the answer," Senator Joe Biden recently said. Ever since, Obama has been creatively fuzzy when asked directly if he would meet with Ahmadinejad - and he has begun to point out that the real leaders of Iran are the clerics led by the Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, who controls Iran...
...culture, the culture of cruelty? School shootings are like plane crashes, rare but riveting for the primitive fears they evoke. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, the executioners of Columbine, gave that fear a face: cold-blooded, calculating, seeking immortality, dancing with the devil. They gave our kids the awful shorthand: You're not going to do a Columbine? Williams' friends asked. They even frisked him that morning before school...