Word: tragic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...government fails to provide such services, many elderly will be forced into expensive and dehumanizing institutions. This push towards institutions will lead to tragic consequences worse that unnecessary costs. Constrained by a lack of staff, some institutions administer nearly lethal levels of tranquilizers: these drugs are often prescribed for the new malady of "institutional anxiety." In other institutions, patients face little physical danger, but they meet with almost equally insidious bureaucratic indignities. For example, one nursing home responded to complaints about its policy of separating husband and wife by setting aside one suite where a couple could enjoy undisturbed privacy...
...American hostility and pressures). Meanwhile, the population of Vietnam, North and South, faces the prospect of oppression as well as hunger and poverty until the end of the century under a regime which puts its interests far above those of the people, judging by all available official pronouncements. A tragic postscript to a tragic war. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Assistant Professor In Sino-Vietnamese History
...poverty made fortunes. They struck oil and gold. Hard work went into it, of course, but for a long time Americans were drunk on the luck of their sheer possibility. Foreigners bemused by America have often thought that too much good luck deprived Americans of a sense of the tragic. In the past 15 years or so, Americans have been riding a bad streak. It is possible they responded to Reagan because his smile reminded them of a time when America was lucky...
...Doll's House is notoriously difficult to stage. Ibsen's once radical idea of making bourgeois ladies and gentlemen into tragic heroes and heroines has become the stuff of conventional theater. The play's social commentary, so bold in the late nineteenth century, sounds amusingly quaint or downright comical if not presented with extreme care. Ibsen weaves his plot slowly and meticulously, revealing his characters as Puppets of Fate. Slaves of Society, each trapped in his own private doll house. The play demands subtlety and intelligent handling of its strong emotions and quirks of fate. Despite obvious effort, the Eliot...
Finally, after years of dropping, after checking the phonebook for first names, after making nicknames out of nicknames, the name-dropper touches bottom--the tragic fifth and last stage. For at the fifth stage (I remember when this happened to Kate Hepburn), the name-dropper slips into near-unconsciousness and drops names instinctively without realizing it. (Ringo keeps telling me he's trying to stop but I just don't believe him) Nor do the references make any sense whatsoever: they become for the dropper as (God, I hope things work out for Theda) vital an element of speech...