Word: shrugging
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Doug's ramblings with his sawed-off, he has peppered his neighborhood with shotgun pellets. He can't explain why he shot the dog. "What does it matter?" he asks with a shrug. Late one evening last March, he and a few friends crept up to a house and took several potshots. "I saw this dog sitting on a couch in this big window above the front porch, so I just shot him." Doug's expression is devoid of remorse or bravado as he drives by the brown, two-story house, recounting the incident one afternoon. A teenage girl with...
Still, is courage a virtue, or is it simply testosterone poisoning? Is remorse, which the narrator now feels, merely the result of bad health? Is God just a neurochemical event, part of the tantalizing aura that precedes an epileptic attack? A shrug is implied here. The narrator faces a chancy brain operation. "I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow," he frets. "Maybe stay at my sister's place. If they send me to the nuthouse I lose the dogs for sure...
...foreign-women victims, unable to speak the language of the country, are loath to file complaints for fear of being injured by pimps or deported by authorities. And faced with the difficulty of sorting out which women are prostitutes by choice and which are coerced, many officials shrug off the problem. "Almost all the girls who come to work in cabarets know what they are getting into," says a top Swiss bureaucrat. "We cannot reform the world's morals...
Other climbers read such details and shrug. Mistake or mischance, there is nothing useful to say. This is not because the deaths are meaningless but because their meaning seems alarmingly personal. They raise the sort of dust that stirs in every mountaineer's sheaf of recollections: soft snow breaks out from under your boots on a steep slope. You slide, gaining speed. Then some mountain god flips a coin, and it comes up heads. You stop sliding, safe as a baby, a few yards above a long drop. Nothing...
...White House cannot just shrug off such barbs; it takes Perot seriously as a political threat. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, 52% of the respondents have a generally favorable opinion of Perot, while only 50% have a similar opinion of Clinton personally (and many fewer approve of the job he is doing as President). On Perot's current major bugbear, the North American Free Trade Agreement, 63% agree with him that it will result in a loss of American jobs, vs. only 25% who believe with Clinton that it will create jobs...