Word: straw
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...regularly made up quotes and printed rumors. Diana was ambushed by paparazzi while riding in her car and reduced to tears. Finally, a story in the Sunday Mirror alleged that she had been trysting with the Prince on the royal family's private train. That was the last straw. Her mother, the Honorable Mrs. Shand-Kydd, fired off a letter to the Times. "Is it necessary or fair to harass my daughter daily, from dawn until well after dusk?" she asked. Then the palace took the almost unprecedented step of demanding a retraction of the "love train" story...
...reformers' goals, the net effect has been a nearly permanent presidential election campaign, which culminates in a 37-primary marathon that exhausts and bewilders both the candidates and the voters. It ultimately leaves the party leaders very little to do at the nominating conventions except put on straw hats and look interested. One of the most remarkable aspects of the thoroughly "reformed" 1980 Democratic Convention was that the 3,331 delegates included only 72 Governors, Senators and Congressmen. By contrast, the assembled delegates included 388 representatives of teachers' unions-one sign that at least part of the nominating...
...imploring the yeomen of Tennessee to switch off their Atwater Kent radios, take down that country fiddle from the wall and scrape out an Elizabethan air. Their best poet, John Crowe Ransom, magically evoked a land where larks' tongues are never stilled, "sunlight lies like pale spread straw" and ladies of "beauty and high degree" arrange jasmine in vases, as courtly gentlemen pace the veranda. "Turn your eyes to the immoderate past," Agrarian Allen Tate advised in his best poem, Ode to the Confederate Dead...
...candidate's background and his knowledge of the facts, the press did that job well with Reagan. He was not so much unknown as too simply perceived. The press had to get past Reagan's aw-shucks actor's persona and also avoid another parody-the straw-filled scarecrow wild man the Carter people created. Reporting gave the voters a plausible portrait of a 9-to-5 executive, only passably informed, given to exaggerated remarks but cautious in action, who wants complicated problems reduced to Reader's Digest brevity, then decides about them without heartburn...
...Grant Wood's American Gothic (in fact, it was painted ten years earlier). Scholz took care to spread his political insult as far as pos sible; Weimar inflation is symbolized by the cretinous child, snot-nosed and snaggletoothed, blowing up a live frog by means of a straw stuck in its anus. In the end, one would need to be half a thug to be politically swayed by such an image...