Word: spunk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Harvard offense seemed to lose its spunk in the third quarter, while Ricoh and his favorite running back, Chuck Goldbach, began to gain some yards...
Perhaps the only thing more faithful than the good old Army Jeep was its good old name, which seemed to capture the spunk of that sprightly warhorse. Now the Pentagon plans to change both with a sometimes klutzy replacement burdened by a certainly klutzy name: the High Mobility Multi-Purpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV). The manufacturer, AM General Corp., calls it the Hummer. No way, says the Army: that rhymes with bummer. It prefers "the HummVee," hardly a name likely to catch on with the average grunt...
When exhaustion hits, her spunk can turn to bile. At the end of a rugged four-day campaign swing, she gave an ungenerous press conference. "Where have you been?" she snapped to a not-too-acute questioner, and said to another, "I answered that before-wasn't I loud enough?" Republicans contend that displays of her clackety-clack Queens, N.Y., style put off vast numbers of voters. Says one White House aide of Ferraro: "She comes across as too abrasive." Richard Wirthlin, the President's pollster, suggests her audiences are swollen by the converted and the merely curious...
Ferraro has taught us how to minimize the effect of breaking rules: a) claim ignorance, b) blame advisers, c) show spunk. None of these actions, however, changes the facts...
...that, some Democrats express hope that the whole affair will work to the advantage of their ticket. Beckel insists that because Ferraro showed so much spunk under fire, "this netted out as a political plus." One senior strategist asserts that Ferraro's performance instilled in campaign workers across the country a fighting spirit that "sometimes turns certain defeats into victories...