Word: vividness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...China in 1946. What If? editor Robert Cowley, who also edits MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, says this exercise is no mere parlor game but makes history "come alive." Others might call it pointless, if mildly interesting. The bloody "factuals" of history are vivid enough without foraging into further imaginings...
This speech is one of the darkest and most unsettling in the Potter books to date. It creates a vivid physical embodiment of a painful mental state, which Muggles call depression, and it demonstrates Rowling's considerable emotional range. She can be both genuinely scary and consistently funny, adept at both broad slapstick and allusive puns and wordplay. She appeals to the peanut gallery with such items as Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, a wizard candy that means what it says on its package; it offers every flavor, ranging from chocolate and peppermint to liver and tripe and earwax...
...downright funny, even absurd. Cherub-faced, with a bowl-shaped haircut unsullied by the professional stylist's scissors, he gives off a dual impression of utter youthfulness and uncanny erudition. He uses the word ontology as naturally as other young men say "dude," but he's quite capable of vivid straight talk. Of his idealistic upbringing he says, "There are families that eat hot dogs and families that don't. We were a family that didn't." And his complaint about a tedious party thrown by his publisher to introduce him to New Haven, Conn., bookstore owners sounds...
...more in common with him than we know or care to admit. Heading into the millennium, America has embarked on a national orgy of thrill seeking and risk taking. The rise of adventure and extreme sports like BASE jumping, snowboarding, ice climbing, skateboarding and paragliding is merely the most vivid manifestation of this new national behavior. Investors once content to buy stocks and hold them quit their day jobs to become day traders, making volatile careers of risk taking. Even our social behavior has tilted toward the treacherous, with unprotected sex on the upswing and hard drugs like heroin...
...Souls Michael Patrick MacDonald's gritty, vivid memoir of growing up Irish and poor in South Boston