Word: variant
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...often-heard comment on inflation is that prices have risen so high that most people could not afford to buy the houses they now own. An ominous variant surfaced at a despair-ridden conference on inflation and the construction industry that was held in Atlanta last week-one of the eleven "minisummits" leading up to the Ford Administration's economic summit Sept. 27 and 28. Cracked Lewis Cenker, president of the National Association of Home Builders: "The commercial banking system can not afford all the real estate it is about...
...used to believe that the self-parodying ineptness of films like this one was the antidote supplied by thoughtful producers to counteract their poisonous ideas. But the appalling example of Walking Tall is still before us. At least one preview audience actually cheered this urban variant on that rube farce. So let the matter be stated as forcefully as possible: Death Wish is a meretricious film-in its curious lack of feeling even for innocent victims of crime, in its hysterical exaggerations of an undeniable problem, and especially in its brazen endorsement of violence as a solution to violence...
...clear now to thoughtful members of the literary apparat that a critic who praises an Iron Curtain writer does so at considerable risk to his reputation as a subtle fellow. Some variant of the skepticism now being directed at Solzhenitsyn is sure to tar the enthusiast. "A great soul, certainly," it will be said, "with great lumps on his head from those rubber truncheons, but a great writer ... ?" The message is stern: under an oppressive state, all artists may be persecuted, but not all those persecuted are artists...
When they have children, some couples give the mother's name to daughters and the father's to sons, or create some combination of the two. A variant is to hyphenate the mother's and father's names. Given that, some hapless offspring of today's children might well be burdened with a mouthful like John Smith-Jones-Doe-McLaughlin...
...people, and giving orders. But it is so far simply unknowable whether Patty's rifle was operable (even though it had a clip of cartridges in firing position) or whether she had been threatened with death if she did not act like a willing participant. Another, even darker variant of this theory is that Patty was enslaved by addicting her to heroin, though the S.L.A. abjured any use of hard drugs in its "code...