Word: sputtering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...retain barriers to American farm exports: they have "held their breath and stomped their little feet," he said in an interview last week. Publicly, he has threatened retaliation against half a dozen "unfair" trade practices by the Europeans, the Japanese and others. And in response to foreign officials who sputter about his "bullying" tactics, he says with a tight smile and easy Tennessee drawl, "I think our message is getting through...
While Western culture holds fast to the idea that true love flames forever (the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula has the Count carrying the torch beyond the grave), nature apparently meant passions to sputter out in something like four years. Primitive pairs stayed together just "long enough to rear one child through infancy," says Fisher. Then each would find a new partner and start all over again...
Meanwhile, women's campaigns began to sputter. Despite the success of feminist fund raisers, most women still occupy an economic class where a $100- a-plate luncheon counts as a new blazer or a dental visit forgone. In Kansas, Democratic challenger Gloria O'Dell raised barely $100,000 compared with incumbent Bob Dole's $2 million. California's Barbara Boxer and Pennsylvania's Lynn Yeakel found themselves too broke to counter their opponents' attack ads until late in the campaign...
What can happen, though, is if you're not firing on all cylinders in that offense. You can sputter. I think you stop the Multiflex, and I've looked at it on film, you stop it by doing things to disconcert that thing...
...triumphs: Houston, site of the Republican National Convention, where the two old friends will launch their last campaign together. But they will have little time for nostalgia. Arrayed against them are obstacles greater than any they have faced in their three decades as a team. The economy continues to sputter, with unemployment stuck near 10% in the major industrial states and consumer confidence in a funk. The President trails Democrat Bill Clinton by 25 points in national polls. Many Republican lawmakers, frightened by local surveys that show Bush dragging them down, are skipping the Houston convention. And the G.O.P...