Word: summons
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Every day, managers across America must summon the courage to let inept subordinates go, but somehow occupants of the Oval Office seem unable to deliver the bad news. In 1958 Dwight Eisenhower endured the turmoil surrounding his chief aide, Sherman Adams, accused of taking favors from wealthy industrialist Bernard Goldfine. Then one day Ike decided he had to make "the hardest, most hurtful decision" he had ever made and fire Adams. Even then he could not do it face-to-face. He summoned Republican National Committee chairman Meade Alcorn and handed him "the dirtiest job I could give you." Alcorn...
...first great catchphrase of the '90s: "I've fallen and I can't get up!" The poorly acted but plaintive cry can be heard in ads for Lifecall, one of many personal emergency-response systems that summon medical help at the press of a button. Now that as many as 350,000 of the systems have been sold, they are beginning to draw fire from consumer-advocacy groups that question the marketing of the high-tech hailers and sometimes even the need for them...
...court, on campus, in conversation, the issue turns on the elasticity of the word rape, one of the few words in the language with the power to summon a shared image of a horrible crime...
Nuclear power. The words conjure first the hellish explosion at Chernobyl that spewed a radioactive cloud across the Ukraine and Europe five years ago this week, poisoning crops, spawning bizarre mutant livestock, killing dozens of people and exposing millions more to dangerous fallout. Then the words summon up Three Mile Island (shown here) and the threat of a meltdown that spread panic across Pennsylvania's rolling countryside seven years earlier. From these grew the alarming television programs, the doomsday books, the terrifying movies, even the jokes (What's served on rice and glows in the dark? Chicken Kiev). Could...
Pusey's decision to summon the police, and his overall handling of student activism in the 1960s, cast a shadow of doubt over the administration's overall ability to effectively manage the campus...