Word: skim
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...insist and insist again, by Vague Generalities. We abhor V.G.’s, we skim right past them, we start wondering what kind of C to give from the first V.G. we encounter; and as they pile up we decide C- (Harvard being Harvard, we do not give D’s. Consider C- a failure). Why? Not because they are a sign the student does not know the material, or hasn’t thought creatively, or any of that folly. They simply make tedious reading. “Locke is a transitional figure...
Some elections skim the surface of American life; others cut very close to the bone. In this campaign we have already been buffeted by exceedingly powerful social and political images--men kissing other men on the steps of San Francisco's city hall, Saddam being pulled from a hole, John Kerry hugging a man he saved in Vietnam, Janet Jackson's exposed breast at the Super Bowl, George W. Bush prancing prematurely in his flight suit, Howard Dean screaming, Bush bringing turkey to the troops. The chaotic rush of images--and the President's constant invocation of incendiary words like...
...page limit, and those oblivious types who insist on sitting in the aisle seats of soon-to-be crowded lecture halls to cause maximum inconvenience to everyone else. Worse of the lot, however, are the semi-spoilt brats who complain about not having money to buy their grande skim lattes. I know this, because I am one of them. I am a card-carrying member of that horde of perpetually complaining masses known as the College Poor, a group fueled week to week by their wages from a low-paid library job which goes some way in funding extravagant lifestyles...
...that the increasing tolerances were to meet not technical requirements but financial ones. The ever changing tolerances meant new purchases, which in turn meant that the engineers who were working on Saddam's missile programs, for which the tubes were in fact destined, had continuing contracts from which to skim money. Kay concluded, "An analyst looks for rational explanations and usually finds them in the technical realm they're used to, but Iraq was almost like a parallel universe. The explanations were driven not by technical reasons but by the moral and personal depravity engendered by the regime. A rational...
...then rode off into the sunset (he moved back to Ohio in 2001), but at the same time he is unbearably eager to drop names and show us what a hotshot insider he is, or at least was. So treat Hollywood Animal like an industry party: arrive late, skim quickly through it for the boldface names, and bail out long before the show's over. -By Lev Grossman