Word: synonyms
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...biblical times when the country was called Mesopotamia, the name became almost a synonym for a rich and fertile land, blessed by nature. Now the place is called Iraq. It is an oven-hot, barren landscape with a population of 9,750,000 and only one significant natural resource: oil. But today's energy-hungry technology has made Iraq's expansive oilfields the focus for half the world's attention...
South of the border, it is turista or "the Aztec two-step." In Asia, visitors from the West call it "Delhi belly." By any name, traveler's diarrhea, a debilitating digestive upset caused by a change in the system's bacterial population, is a synonym for misery that can spoil a trip and jeopardize the victim's health. The standard prophylactic for many years has been Entero-Vioform, a drug so frequently used that it is the traveler's best friend. That fond relationship has come under challenge by the American Medical Association. The A.M.A. Journal...
...from the anonymous creators of the Forum to Michelangelo and Bernini, set down that tawny palimpsest on the Tiber. It was left to a failed 18th century architect, who built one long-ignored church on the Aventine, to give the city its definitive shape: the word Piranesian, as a synonym for phantasmagoric grandeur, has entered the language of art. This month, a splendid exhibition of Piranesi's studies and engravings opened at Columbia University in Manhattan; its centerpiece is a set of 23 wash drawings for Piranesi's intended remodeling of San Giovanni in Laterano. These rare sketches...
...term "Hillbilly" is an Americanism, dating from somewhere around the early 1900's. It may derive from two Scottish colloquialisms, "hill-folk," and "billie," the former used pejoratively, designating a rebel against Charles II, the latter used in Scots dialect as a synonym for "fellow" or "comrade...
...Conqueror, showing how words have changed color through the ages. Before becoming a game, Badminton served variously as the name of an English country estate and a cooling drink. As late as 1848, "snoop" meant "to appropriate or consume dainties in a clandestine manner." The word doom was a synonym for statute until legal proceedings and human nature changed its meaning. Even though the microprinting can be read only with the accompanying magnifying glass, which makes for hard browsing, the whole O.E.D. in two volumes is the etymological buy of a decade...