Word: sobriquet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Critics quickly dubbed the Strategic Defensive Initiative "Star Wars." That sobriquet suggested a fantasy-not just a dream, but a pipedream, and a potentially perilous one at that...
...Lenin on his 70th birthday three years ago, Brezhnev is supposed to have told his loyal deputy, "I can think of no case in which you have ever forgotten anything, even when it dealt with things that seemed negligible at first glance." That accolade earned Chernenko the potentially alarming sobriquet "the man who never forgets." Stored in his capacious memory are countless files, names, incidents, favors given and favors received. In the view of many Soviet analysts, he is far from a fool. As Alexander Rahr, a Soviet-born expert at Radio Liberty in Munich, puts...
...first of the new setbacks occurred last July when the Washington Public Power Supply System, or WPPSS (more widely known by the satiric sobriquet of "Whoops"), defaulted on $2.25 billion worth of bonds. The consortium of 23 electric companies, which had postponed or canceled construction of four of its five proposed nuclear power plants, had sold the securities to help finance two of the facilities. The WPPSS default, the biggest municipal bond failure in history, shook financial markets and raised questions about the ability of utilities to manage nuclear plant construction...
...soldiers, the kelpers have become known as "bennies," after a British TV character who is a decent, hard-working but thickheaded farmer. When military commanders reportedly banned the sobriquet, the troops quickly devised a new one: "stills," short for "still bennies." The natives, in turn, refer to the soldiers as "squaddies," an archaic British dig at military men of low rank...
...Queen and Prince Philip are experienced at playing themselves in public, but rarely has the royal whirl been so fatiguingly scheduled. Even the ordinarily laid-back colonials in Mellowland, Fleet Street's sobriquet for California, are stepping lively. - By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Mary Cronin with the Queen and Alessandra Stanley/ San Diego