Word: tenuously
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Four punishing years into her six-year term, Aquino remains surprisingly undaunted by the precarious state of her country and her tenuous grip on the helm. Her government is struggling to cope with a store of major problems -- economic, political and security-related -- which have created a growing crisis of confidence among liberal activists over the ability of fragile democratic institutions to deliver reform...
...anger, between the need to ingratiate himself with the predominantly white mass audience and, at the same time, the need to tell it hard truths. He was a performer running risks with his audience, but more important, with his slightly schizoid self. Destructive possibilities -- of the comedian's always tenuous bond with his audience, therefore of career -- were hinted at. We were kept on edge...
Like any other wounded animal, the tobacco industry is lashing back. Realizing that their flat-earth rhetoric about the "inconclusive" and "tenuous" links between smoking and disease is no longer fooling anybody, their defense has become more shrill, more cagey. Call it a three-pronged attack; the metaphor conjures up images of pitchforks, which nicely complement the satanic motif already inherent in fire, smoke and self-inflicted suffering...
What the protest over Bush really displays is not disrespect but uncertainty. Women, after all, have always known they could be mothers. It is the opportunity to have full-strength, male-like careers that is relatively new and, therefore, tenuous. What makes it frightening is the assumption that they can play both roles well. Bush has acknowledged that being a woman was easier in her day. In a speech last year at Smith -- the school she dropped out of in 1944 at 19 to marry George Bush -- she told the students, "You have so many options that it must...
Evidence that greenhouse warming has already started is at best tenuous. Even though some scientists believe the concentration of CO2 in the air has shot up 25% since the early 1800s, the average global temperature has risen by no more than 0.5 degrees C (1.1 degrees F), and even that measurement is suspect. Moreover, the rise has been uneven. From about 1940 to 1970, a cooling period inspired some forecasters to predict a return of the ice ages...