Word: wet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gray madonna and her smudges of children hover outside the church, despair incarnate. The glib hustler in designer jeans glides down the movie line. The kids with the grimy windshield rags orbit the intersection. The old man with no eyes sits on the steam grates in winter in a wet cloud of pain. The obsequious panhandler waits outside the automated-teller machines, where wallets are full and walls are transparent. Somehow, always never seemed so often...
...even that is something of a victory. "I'm 5 ft. 5 in., and 105 now. Yay!" laughs 16-year- old Freestyler Janet Evans. When she nearly made the 1986 World Championship team at 14, she stood a towering 4 ft. 10 in. and weighed about 80 lbs. soaking wet, which is most of the time. "Everyone knew me because of my size, but I just wanted to be recognized as a good swimmer." That recognition is piling up almost as fast as the 300 to 400 laps she does daily. Last year she became one of only a handful...
...tapings. Despite her lavish life-style, Oprah notes, her plates still don't match, and she says she gave up a chauffeur because "it drove me crazy having someone at my beck and call." She now drives herself to work in a Jaguar convertible, often with her hair dripping wet from her morning shampoo...
...didn't want to admit to being Communists. Today it's used by people who don't want to admit to being liberals. In the radical 1960s, when my ears got their political training, "liberal" was a semicomic term of abuse similar to the wonderful British political insult "wet." It meant wishy-washy, ineffectual, irrelevant. To those ears, today's sinister variants such as "ultraliberal" sound bizarre. In the 1970s conservatives were still claiming prissily that they were the "true" liberals, in the classic 18th century sense, and complaining that this esteemed label had been kidnaped by collectivists...
...aircraft carrier, for example, the body is crushed against the back of the seat and the wind roars in the ears. "You forget the whole thing's bolted to the concrete floor," says David Figgins, a program manager at Honeywell. "I've seen top guns climb out wringing wet. I've seen seasoned pilots throw...