Word: spates
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This tendency to commune by semaphore has probably not increased at all in centuries, but consciousness of it surely has. A spate of books like this season's Reading Faces and last decade's popular Body Language have explored the individual's tendency to broadcast things (unconsciously and otherwise) through all manner of physical movement and facial gymnastics. Such matters, made widely familiar by pop sociology, anthropology and psychology, have become the stuff of common conversation. Michael Korda's Power! How to Get It, How to Use It, like other books of this ilk, is mainly...
Begin's justifications for the raid might have been more convincing if a persistent odor of electioneering had not clung to some of his other actions. The day after Begin's press conference, an ugly spate of name-calling erupted between the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader Peres. Reason: Begin had given the Israeli Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a copy of Peres' "personal and top-secret" letter that resulted in one of the raid's postponements. Peres had learned that the attack was scheduled for May 10, the date of the deciding round of French presidential elections...
...starts advocating shooting people, it's a natural reaction: the guy's either a nut or a federal agent." Hinckley was a voracious reader of newspapers, so it is logical that his affiliation with the Nazis began in early 1978: it was then that a spate of national news stories appeared about the National Socialists, mostly involving their planned marches through the heavily Jewish community of Skokie...
...ugly message called for the elimination of "stinking black monkeys" from "a white society." It was mailed from Cleveland, signed K.K.K. and addressed to a black senior at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., part of a spate of hate mail and threatening phone calls to blacks on campus. A similar letter was sent to Williams President John Chandler...
...since the 1930s, when the Depression brought a spate of voter initiatives to the ballot, have citizens themselves proposed so many new laws-and limits-for government. David Schmidt, editor of Initiative News Report, describes it accurately as "a new national trend to lawmaking at the ballot box." In 18 states and the District of Columbia, voters put on the ballot a total of 42 referendums. Their actions ranged from a nonbinding vote by five southern New Jersey counties to secede from the state to a decision by residents of Washington, D.C., to take a first step toward statehood...