Word: surfeits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many people, the war has brought unemployment and a surfeit of idle time. Most schools have been closed, and children are playing in the streets. Many construction projects and factories have been shut down, and men have been mobilized for the front. The Daura oil refinery on the outskirts of Baghdad, a potential target of Iranian fighters, has been closed down as a safety precaution. Along the palm-lined avenues, men sit in cafés and restaurants much of the day, sipping tea and exchanging the latest rumors about the war. Although gasoline is scarce, there appear...
...records has got completely out of hand in the 20th century. Merely keeping track of records requires the toil of a considerable industry and the regular publication of hundreds of thick books with fine print. Scores of thousands of new records are claimed every year. There would be a surfeit even if the world of sports did not chip in its promiscuous confetti of records...
...gingerly French attitude toward the Soviets raises a larger question. In a sharply worded critique of French foreign policy in the June issue of Harper's, Historian Walter Laqueur charges that "France suffers not so much from a surfeit of nationalism as from a lack of faith, or a land of defeatism trying to masquerade as an unemotional strategy." Laqueur concedes that "there is a Gaullist tradition in modern French history, but there is also the heritage of Vichy, and it is not at all certain that the Gaullist tradition has prevailed of late. Contemporary appeasement has many guises...
...parentage: "Expatriation allows one to drop a lot of unwanted moral luggage, lets talent travel lightly and opens it to the histrionic." He speculates on the Edwardians' taste for the novels of George Meredith, for satire and high comedy: "One can see why: an age of surfeit had arrived. The lives of the upper classes were both enlivened and desiccated by what seems to have been a continuous diet of lobster and champagne-a diet well-suited in its after-effects to the stimulation of malice." His description of Haggard captures both an individual and a class: "Like many...
American sensitivities have been sharpened by the spectacle of the Ayatullah's disgracefully successful tent show. But a nation that lives in a surfeit of images and excitements may have a short memory. Since the U.S. emerged as a superpower at the end of World War II, certain conventions of the historical art form-the assault on the U.S. embassy and the U.S.I.A. library, Uncle Sam burning in effigy, YANKEE GO HOME on the compound walls, the vilification of the "paper tiger"-have become so habitual as to represent a rich tradition. Anti-Americanism has grown in direct proportion...