Word: vast
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...fields concealed spikes, booby traps permeated jungles, and barracks were vulnerable to terrorist attacks. No wonder the grunts were paranoid and their commanders frustrated. So strategy was reduced to a basic formula: kill as many of the enemy as possible in hopes of breaking their morale. We deployed our vast arsenal, and butchered at least a million of them. We gauged progress by piles of twisted corpses--the grim "body count." Yet the Vietnamese continued to fight. After the war, Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. crowed to a communist officer, "We won every battle." Replied his analog: "That...
Small inherited a vast and (literally) crumbling empire of 16 museums and galleries, 142 million artifacts--ranging from the Wright brothers' biplane to Nancy Reagan's silk-satin Inaugural gown--nine research centers and the National Zoo. Unlike his predecessors, however, Small is neither a scientist nor an academic. He spent 27 years at Citibank, and his last job was COO of Fannie Mae. He plays flamenco guitar and owns a world-class collection of Amazonian art, but he got the job because he knows how to raise money and crunch numbers. His mission was to put the world...
Thank the gods that copyright law was not discovered in the Iron Age. If it had been, and if Homer had been succeeded by some litigious heirs, the vast trove of Western literature derived or extrapolated from the Iliad and Odyssey--including Vergil's Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Tennyson's Ulysses, Joyce's Ulysses--might not exist. And what damages would today's judges award Christopher Marlowe? He wrote a wildly popular poem called The Passionate Shepherd to His Love that was answered, in identical verse form, by Sir Walter...
...name Johannes Vermeer now carries a vast aura of desirability and sweetness. It has become one of the most beloved way points of art history, like Rembrandt, Piero della Francesca or Watteau. Nothing, it seems, is going to change that, but it wasn't always so. Vermeer's reputation is almost wholly posthumous. One of the reasons why he is so admired and his pictures are so unattainable a goal for collectors is precisely the cause of his obscurity in the 19th century: the rarity of his work...
...think the global economy is vast now, wait until Hernando de Soto is through with it. Where most see Egyptian shantytowns, De Soto sees tiny businesses and homes that together are worth 35 times more than the companies traded on the Cairo stock exchange. That grimy army of Mexico City street vendors, he claims, is part of an underground economy that helps create 85% of Latin America's new jobs. All it takes to jump-start economic growth in poor nations, he insists, is to legalize those clandestine markets, unleashing legions of new creditworthy entrepreneurs who can be trading partners...