Word: shrilled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Square conjures up the archetypes of old New England. What isn't dark or neutral is flag-colored, like the fife-and-drum wallpaper that peels at its yellowed seams. A red telephone, the locus, sits ominously on the pastor's oaken desk. When it rings, the sound is shrill, urgent, like the Oval Office hot line or the Batphone. But to Pastor Tom Michael, the caller on the other end transcends Zbigniew Brzezinski or Commissioner Gordon. For when the enemy is sin, each call concerns not law and order, but eternal life and perpetual damnation...
Despite the shrill peal of air-raid sirens regularly echoing throughout the port of Basra early last week, the absence of air strikes for four days had nurtured a languid mood among the Iraqi soldiers and civilians in the town. Troops from the front lines recounted boastful tales of Iranians fleeing before their artillery barrages, while the television pumped out scenes of Iraqi attacks to martial music and announced the claim that Ahwaz, 45 miles into Iran, had just been captured. "Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day," boasted Captain Abu Rashid, beaming proudly in his black beret and crisp green...
...apparently ended a few years before his death in 1976 -was tolerated by his comrades on the condition that he keep his new commonlaw wife away from politics. But when Mao launched China on the chaotic Cultural Revolution in the mid-'60s, Jiang Qing rose to become the shrill tyrant of the movement. "Sex," she once confided to American Sinologist Roxane Witke, "is engaging in the first rounds. What sustains interest in the long run is power...
...runs around the stage, bangs his head with the microphone, pours beer down his shirt, eats a napkin, and generally goes crazy, punctuating each line with a shrill quick laugh, reminiscent of ventriloquist Paul Winchell's dummy Knucklehead...
Reagan managed to make all his usual criticisms of Jimmy Carter, liberalism and the welfare state without being shrill or strident. There was scarcely an echo of Barry Goldwater's like-it-or-lump-it 1964 campaign oratory, though many of the ideas were the same. He was pungent without being pugnacious. Big Government, he warned, is "never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us ... High taxes, we are told, are somehow good for us, as if, when Government spends our money...