Word: synonymity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Rhinestone, long a synonym for the meretricious, has its reputation restored in a glamorous collection of brooches, necklaces, tiaras, shoe buckles, bracelets and earrings. Then again, even Styrofoam would glitter on such icons as Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn...
...heard all the jokes: we know that "spacy" and "flaky" seem almost to have been invented for California and that in the dictionary California is a virtual synonym for "far out." Ever since gold was first found flowing in its rivers, the Shangri-La La of the West has been the object of as many gibes as fantasies: just over a century ago, Rudyard Kipling was already pronouncing that "San Francisco is a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people" (others might say "insanely perfect"); and more than 40 years ago, S.J. Perelman was barreling down...
...while George Bush made it possible to forget about Dan Quayle. The Vice President, whose name has become a worldwide synonym for a man in over his head, faded into near invisibility as Bush dominated the headlines with his forceful leadership in Panama and the Persian Gulf. Watching the frenetic President jog and swim, angle for bonefish and gun his speedboat, few thought of him as an ordinary mortal nearing his 67th birthday...
Neither centuries under Turkish and Austro-Hungarian domination nor more than four decades of communist rule have obliterated the ethnic passions that made the Balkans a synonym for fractious politics. Now, with the communist world crumbling, new instability may follow the glum quiet of the Pax Sovietica. The peril exists side by side with the opportunity for healthy change, but the current political ferment of Eastern Europe is an inherently volatile mix in which old demons -- belligerent nationalism and demagogic populism -- could win out as easily as liberal democracy...
Never mind that Soviet troops left Afghanistan long ago. The mujahedin are now fighting other Afghans and even one another, but the curriculum has not kept up. To schoolboys, "Russians" remains an indelible synonym for enemy...