Word: sobriquet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...desk is clean, save for the week's schedule of media interviews and a list of Perot coordinators in all 50 states. But at a time when Bush and Clinton are racing around the country, giving speeches, honing positions, posing against scenic backdrops, this small man, who loves the sobriquet "Billionaire Boy Scout," suddenly leads the polls. A TIME/CNN survey last week by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman underlines Perot's surprising appeal: he wins a three-way race for the White House with 33% to Bush's 28%, with Clinton trailing at 24%. Perot has done the impossible: crafted a credible...
...well. Because before Siegel got around to reinventing Las Vegas, his most important project was reinventing himself. Far better known in the press and gossip of his glory days, the 1940s, as "Bugsy," he was perhaps the most famous mobster of his era. Not that he liked his colorful sobriquet (he tended to punch out people who used it in his presence) or his public identification as a hood (his preference was "sportsman...
...close friends familiar with Basa's activities, his daring had earned him a nickname. He was the "Hero of the Crossing," the same admiring sobriquet awarded Anwar Sadat after the Egyptian army crossed the Suez Canal during the 1973 October War with Israel. Now, at 40, with a wife and nine children safely out of Kuwait, Basa was headed for jail with phony papers identifying him as a citizen of Qatar. "That's what saved me," says Basa, recalling the story he had carefully rehearsed against the possibility of capture. "I told the Iraqis that I was just another expatriate...
...producers of this mountain of missives call it direct mail or mail order. The U.S. Postal Service refers to the onslaught as "bulk business mail." But to most people the deluge of material that descends on them each year is just plain junk mail, a typically American sobriquet that recognizes its vast and disorderly variety, its cheeky aggressiveness and its easy ability to raise hackles. Whatever its name, it is an extraordinary by-product of democratic civilization. Catalogs, catalogs, catalogs. Political flyers. Charitable solicitations. Environmental entreaties (on recycled paper, naturally). Sweepstakes packets. Magazine subscription offers. Investment brochures. Anything...
...once called "the closest embodiment of the Johnsonian type of literary dictatorship the United States had known." From the image of the man and writer that emerges in this diary, it was a fitting sobriquet for journalist H.L. Menken...