Word: veneered
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Stoddard, like most of Washington's Nunn-watchers, was assuming that the Senator was putting the finishing touches on a work that was his -- and the Joint Chiefs' -- in all but name. The hearings were seen as Nunn's attempt to trim down the thin veneer of political correctness the President had added to the policy in order to claim an "honorable compromise." As irritated as Nunn might be at Clinton's admittedly tortured distinctions between gay "orientation" (to be tolerated) and gay "conduct" (grounds for dismissal), the betting was that he would merely badger Defense Secretary Les Aspin...
...just some architectural veneer, Barcelona's whimsy echoes in the Catalan spoken here as well. For instance, in this capital of Catalonia common words begin with X's, and it's somehow endearing that you can buy candy in a xocolateria on your way to a sparkling wine bar--a xampanyeria--called Xampau Xampany. Moreover, a government-printed language textbook eachews the dry repetitions of "amo amas amat" that filled my high-school Latin primer and replaces them with two unclothed cartoon Catalans locked in a torrid embrace...
...THINGS KEPT THE 3.15-ACRE GLASS-AND-STEEL structure called Biosphere 2 from being just another greenhouse: a hermetic seal separating 3,800 species of plants and animals, including four men and four women, from the rest of the planet, and a veneer of scientific legitimacy. The seal has been broken several times in the past year and a half -- most recently to pump in 10 tons of badly needed oxygen. Now the veneer of credibility, already bruised by allegations of tamper-prone data, secret food caches and smuggled supplies, has cracked...
...operation slowly got under way, the 3,000 U.S. troops found themselves spread thin, trying to answer a host of competing demands. Most of the capital's armed thugs crept away, but soldiers had yet to impose more than a veneer of security. On Saturday, U.S. combat helicopters destroyed three armed Somali vehicles that had opened fire on the American gunship. Relief workers groused about poor communications and stalled food shipments; more urgent were the calls for help from Good Samaritans trapped in their compounds in outlying towns where marauding gunmen were still stealing, fighting and killing. Somali clan leaders...
Strip away the veneer of traditional religion, however, and a superstitious pagan often lurks underneath. Many Russians light candles in church nowadays the way they formerly paid their Communist Party dues -- as a kind of insurance, just in case. Belief in miracles remains strong in a nation once fervently dedicated to the scientific method. How else to explain the extraordinary following of psychic healers like Anatoli Kashpirovsky and Alan Chumak, who held audiences spellbound with their televised seances a few years ago? Even sophisticated Muscovites rushed to buy supposedly energized issues of newspapers and placed jars of water by their...