Word: understands
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...right hands, English is a precision instrument. And, like all such devices, it is alternately blunted and sharpened by its users. In 1978, many nicks and abrasions came from Washington. Ernest Boyer, U.S. Commissioner of Education, admitted that he had been faking it: he actually pretended to understand memos. The confession was prompted by logorrhea in his own department: "This office's activities during the year were primarily continuing their primary functions of education of the people to acquaint them of their needs, problems and alternate problem solutions, in order that they can make wise decisions in planning...
...People don't understand why so many women find themselves in this desperate plight," says Cynthia Marano, 31, director of the Baltimore center and coordinator of the alliance's newly formed successor, the Displaced Homemakers Network. She blames the whole spectrum of social change-ever-rising divorce rates, unemployment, inflation, longer life spans, stubborn sexism and ageism. One important new factor, she adds, is the no-fault divorce laws that have been adopted by 47 states. "They are basically beneficial to younger women, but leave older women without bargaining leverage and without enough to live on." All these...
...first English-language picture went by a title so long that some moviegoers could not finish lip reading it: The End of the World in Our Usual Bed in a Night Full of Rain. It also suffered from an insurmountable problem: for the first time American audiences could understand what Wertmuller was saying. Warner Bros., which had plans to finance two other Wertmuller pictures, quietly changed its mind and gave her a map of Rome. One of the few movies able to quell the mind-numbing trend was Paul Mazursky's marvelous An Unmarried Woman; it grossed $62.5 million...
...theory, it is not a great leap from the North American chili-tortilla parlor to the true provincial cuisine of Mexico. In fact, it would take years for the most diligent gringo to understand or annotate this peasant-rooted cuisine of peppers and cornmeal, arroz, barbacoa and relleno. Diana Kennedy, English by birth and Mexicana by persuasion, invested a large part of her life tasting and testing south of the border to produce The Cuisines of Mexico in 1972. She spent five more years researching the 1978 followup, Recipes from the Regional Cooks of Mexico (Harper & Row; 288 pages...
...Coasters, the team gave goofy high spirits and tough sidewalk irony to songs that were essentially comic melodramas in miniature. They also provided a musical definition of rock that still works as well as any: "You say that music's for the birds/ And you can't understand the words/ Well, honey, if you did/ You'd really blow your lid/ 'Cause baby, that is rock and roll...