Word: sobriquet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...countrymen refer to him, both admiringly and pejoratively, as "the Bulldozer." He walks like a man about to topple forward under his weight (235 lbs.), each large step shaking the floor as he advances. Both the sobriquet and the gait are appropriate, for Israel's new Defense Minister, Ariel ("Arik") Sharon, 53, whose responsibilities include administration of the Arab territories occupied since 1967, is already exerting more political weight than all his colleagues combined in Prime Minister Menachem Begin's four-week-old Cabinet...
...that woeful rule. There, a Texas-style shoot-out is being staged by two local papers: the deeply conservative Morning News (daily circ. 283,700), which used to be dismissed as the Morning Snooze, and the Times Herald (daily circ. 243,500), whose sensational coverage once earned it the sobriquet Crimes Herald. Locked in a struggle to become the best in the booming Southwest, both papers are rapidly piling up prizes as well as profits. At the same time they are proving, as the Times Herald put it in a nationwide help-wanted campaign, that "there's more...
What had gone wrong for Silverman, whose shrewd instincts once earned him the sobriquet the Man with the Golden Gut? Answer: a combination of great expectations, poor management and bad luck. When Silverman took over the network, too many people-himself included -believed he could reverse the tailspin with little more than some savvy program shuffling. But there were few winners to shuffle, and no Dallas-size megabits that can help a network vault from third place to first. Says Ethel Winant, Silverman's vice president of mini-series and novels-for-TV: "You can't snap your...
...niitzliche Abgabe (useful contribution). In France, where there is veritas in the vino, a payoff is called a pot-de-vin or jug of wine. The Italians refer to a bribe as a bustarella (little envelope). Under-the-table payments in East Africa go by the sobriquet chai, Swahili...
...will be considerably easier for, say, a pleased New York Post to write its 3-in. headlines: BONNIE RONNIE, or DUTCH TREAT, rather than resorting to a characteristic, though imprecise, YAY. There is, of course, a kind of nickname that does not stem from a desire for familiarity. Sobriquet is a more ceremonial word for nickname (sort of a nickname's given name), but it is generally used in a formal, titular sense, and not as anything one actually would call someone else. A nickname may be at once demeaning and endearing (see New Zealand's Prime Minister...