Word: smokescreen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...This is a smokescreen because they don't like teacher testing. These are the same people who would say, 'Well, we're going to pass Johnny to the fourth grade because we don't want to give him a failing grade because it might affect his self-esteem.' So then you put Johnny in the fourth grade and promote him to the fifth grade, and then he gets socially promoted to the teacher college. And then when he gets his teaching degree, he can't pass a literacy test. I don't go along with that. That...
...much sometimes like to think of themselves as complicated. "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man," wrote Ernest Hemingway, "is a man's life"--meaning that the most complicated subject he knew was himself. Complexity is a sort of macho/metaphysical burden. But maybe the smokescreen of the "complicated" is also the beginning of the storyteller's art. ("Bill! Bill Faulkner, where have you been for the last three days?" "It's a complicated story, dear...
...justify not drinking on grounds of hypocrisy, given that I believed (and still do believe) that 21 is the proper drinking age--it encourages us to think twice before drinking at a young age and, studies show, it cuts drunk driving deaths. But hypocrisy began to seem like a smokescreen, given my propensity to jay-walk and speed without hesitation...
...Without further evidence, the charge stands largely as rumor. The money itself, if the Vatican ever held it, may long since have been returned to Utashas who fled to Spain and Argentina after the regime's collapse. But while those rumors persisted, the intelligence source speculated they were a "smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository." Search warrant, anyone...
...merger was just used as a smokescreen, probably had very little to do with it," said Madras