Word: soppingly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Following its refusal to grant tenure to Michael Useem, a radical assistant professor, nearly two years ago, the Sociology Department's decision to hire Skocpol and Taylor seemed to be a sop to the radicals. In the face of widespread protest over the departure of several radical economists and Useem, and with no commitment ever to grant tenure to the newly-hired radicals, the Sociology Department appeared to be simultaneously answering immediate radical demands reasonably and preserving the traditional character of Harvard sociology over the long range...
During the past two decades, for example, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh cleared Himalayan foothills to make more room for crops. Without the forests, which act as great sponges that sop up and hold rainfall, the water rapidly ran off the slopes. The accelerated runoff caused disastrous floods over the past year. In cleared jungles in Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil, heavy rains quickly leached the nutrients from the thin layer of topsoil, rendering the land infertile within a year or two. (The trees had both anchored and nourished the soil.) In other cleared jungles, the sun burned out the soil...
When those being robbed resisted, it became necessary to kill, maim and wound them in order to accomplish the planned robbery. This has always been standard operating procedure (SOP) by the military everywhere, in cases of national aggression. This was and is, of course, the reason for sending troops in the first place. It is certainly conceivable, to me at least, that Calley was doing what he was sent to do, as were many thousands of others. Unfortunately for Calley, his crimes were reported, and it was therefore thought necessary for public relations purposes, to make a scapegoat...
Butterflies are Free. The Harold Krenz story reduced to the usual Broadway sop and filmed mechanically. With Edward Albert and Goldie Hawn...
...psychological quirks of the perpetrators. In Cool Breeze, the gang is given a vaguely altruistic motive (the money from the job will go to start a "black people's bank"), which once proposed is rapidly forgotten. Pollack's script uses this political ploy as a kind of sop, an attempt to make the gang not merely crooks but criminal revolutionaries...