Word: verbal
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...misgivings over the congressionally mandated requirement that nuclear material not be reprocessed or transferred without U.S. approval. Prospects are slim that a compromise agreement can be worked out in time for Reagan's scheduled visit to Peking in April. Nonetheless. Administration officials were cheered by Zhao's verbal assurances that China intends to abide by the 1968 nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which it has refused to sign...
Once the bourgeoisie had decided not to talk about what it did, it created a new symbolic language, both verbal and nonverbal, to convey information. Middle-class women no longer got pregnant, for example; they became enceinte, or were "in an interesting condition." Painters and sculptors thrilled staid merchants with luscious nudes fig-leafed with titles like Venus Now Wakes. Manet's Olympia shocked the salon of 1865 not because she was naked but because she looked back at the viewer with the defiant eyes of a thoroughly contemporary Parisian courtesan. On second thought, said Freud...
...puts on display real, articulate people whose company one mightily enjoys sharing. It proclaims Jeremy Irons as one of the finest young actors. It refines a dishwater dilemma, accommodating one's ideals to one's spouse, into a sparkling tonic. It marks the return of radiance -verbal, intellectual, emotional, theatrical - to a Broadway too long in the dark...
...term Pax Romana. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace," protested an English nobleman quoted in Tacitus. Viet Nam brought us new words for the old realities: soldiers "wasted" the enemy, some "fragged" their own officers, bombers provided "close air support." Even the CIA contributed a verbal novelty: "termination with extreme prejudice...
...weapon to be used against fools, an aphrodisiac with which to ply faculty wives, and a solace whenever thoughts of suicide dance in his head. Still, words give Gowan problems. His rampant eloquence can prove an embarrassment, as when one avid matron removes her brassiere and Gowan offers this verbal foreplay: "Released from their support, her breasts drooped like hanged men." And for ages now he has been unable to put words into an order that would constitute a publishable poem. As his rueful ex-wife notes, "Gowan always maintained that what he hated most about writing was the paperwork...