Word: symbolic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...often unfair. "They're just showing off," is the charge hurled at people who use their cell phones to do what everybody else is legitimately doing--talking on the bus, making calls from the sidewalk, chatting while driving a car. An expensive telephone might be considered a status symbol--but so are a lot of other things that are less obviously useful yet don't arouse public ire. It should be recognized that the cell phone is just a tool. What determines rudeness is how it is used. People who need to shout into their cell phone probably just need...
Sooner or later, most icons turn up on postage stamps. The Palestinian Authority, seeking a symbol of sovereignty, put Yasser Arafat's hirsute face on a series of stamps. Meanwhile, the U.S. Postal Service, eager to display American culture, put Mr. Bugs Bunny on a new stamp this week. That's all, folks...
...phrase used by one of them--"the Lord's waste," an unowned biblical desert full of strange beasts and savage half-men. However, although America produced no significant landscape painting or religious art during the 17th or 18th century, by the mid-19th century, landscape was the national religious symbol...
...arts, especially architecture, flourished until the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Indeed, it continued thereafter, for the New Deal conceived of the vast public work as an expression of shared potential, communal will and can-do. Its epitome, though, was the skyscraper, that uniquely American form. As a symbol of Promethean energy, the skyscraper has never been surpassed. It is the architecture of smooth-flowing congestion, an American ideal, and it took ever more glorious forms in such designs as the Empire State Building and the great, self-sufficient urban complex of Rockefeller Center...
...health in 25 years. We're living longer, breathing cleaner air, drinking cleaner water. Crime is in free fall, with violent evildoing near a 22-year low, and the downtowns we once gave up for dead are bristling with coffee bars, green markets, life. New York City, that trusty symbol of terminal decay, is bloated no more. It boasts America's sharpest drop in crime, a rekindled economy and--mirabile dictu!--an $800 million budget surplus. Out in the suburbs, our gardens are costly and ambitious, and shiny grills are taking up residence on our new redwood decks. The statisticians...