Word: spartan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hate Hemingway. He is both a virulent misogynist and an anti-Semite. His lauded Spartan prose style is choppy and arid. His books are a strain of simple verbal diarrhea. There is nothing to like about him. At least that’s what I said whenever Hemingway’s name was brought up until just about a month ago, when I read “The Sun Also Rises.” I had been in Paris for 6 weeks. All summer I had been walking past cafés where Hemingway drank himself into...
Military commanders had only to read the law to see that Congress wasn't serious about protecting gay service members. The law's text is a tissue of barely disguised bigotry. For instance, it points out that service members must "accept living conditions and working conditions that are often spartan, primitive and characterized by forced intimacy, with little or no privacy." One can forgive the historically inappropriate reference to the Spartans - fierce warriors whose loyalty to one another in no way excluded sexual relationships, and indeed may have encouraged them. But the specter of "forced intimacy" recalled the worst kind...
FARC commanders dismiss the "narco-guerrilla" portrayal as government propaganda and insist they're still a viable rebel movement whose survival doesn't depend on drug income. For his part, Alberto points to his unit's spartan housing conditions - mountain and jungle shacks often without electricity or running water - as proof that they're not exactly living as sumptuously as famous cocaine kingpins like Pablo Escobar...
...eyes on the projector screen, faces barely visible in the sodden light of an early March morning. Their dress is standard-issue—black wind pants, olive green windbreakers, and gray T-shirts. They are attentive. They are quiet. They are getting a lesson in warfare from the Spartan King Leonidas...
...Chaney’s charges focus on the projector screen as the well-muscled Leonidas—star of the mayhem-laden film “300”—claws his way up a bare rock face. The Spartan commander has only a cloak and a loincloth to protect him from the elements. Despite his formidable abdominals, the climb seems to be giving him some trouble...