Word: vexing
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Czechoslovakia's brief ethnic feud also illustrated the hair-trigger sensitivities that vex Eastern Europe. Slovaks, who account for a third of the nation's 15 million people, have long nursed a sense of victimization. Wary of Czech domination, Slovak leaders hinted at secession unless Prague agreed to extensive decentralization of core institutions, from the national bank to oil pipelines to management of minority affairs...
Landscape Ryder could handle -- though not for reasons Turner would have approved. It made fewer demands on particularity. "There was no detail to vex the eye," Ryder wrote of one view of a lone tree in a field near Yarmouth, Mass. And so "I squeezed out big chunks of pure, moist color and taking my palette knife, I laid on blue, green, white and brown in great sweeping strokes . . . I saw that it was good and clean and strong. I saw nature springing into life upon my dead canvas. It was better than nature . . . I raced around the fields like...
...most of them in conflict. The sharpest divisions, Sparks observes, originated in the 19th century, when immigrant Boers -- the Dutch word for farmers -- feuded with their English overlords in the Cape Colony. When Britain forbade slavery, the Boers' Great Trek began. Kipling caught their spirit: "His neighbours' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest./ He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed...
...author's formula has become too predictable, however, and Hot Money is especially welcome because it offers a variation. No steamer trunks this trip, though as usual there are a few "ers" in the mixture, for flavor. Only the locked room of the mind (and the odd explosion) vex the hero, an amateur steeplechase rider named Ian Pembroke, as he puzzles out who is trying to murder his rich and autocratic father...
...even businesses that would carry a larger burden under the committee's plan may be reluctant to make a fuss if it means holding up the bill's progress. The drawn-out process of tax reform, with all its uncertainty, has started to vex corporate leaders because it impedes them from making strategic plans. Complains Stephen Sinclair, president of Rubloff Financial Services in Chicago: "This has been going on since 1984. If they would just make up their minds and tell us what the tax law is going to be, we could go on and do our business." That prospect...