Word: whiff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...slogans that convey them, have reached the souls of millions of Americans who seem to communicate with one another through a national emotional chain letter. Off-putting or silly to the uninitiate, her messages inspire true believers. She has tapped into a preoccupation with addiction and alcohol, added a whiff of New Age mysticism and come up with a message that reaches Americans adrift in an atomistic society and often disillusioned with traditional psychotherapy...
...radio to the crammed titles on a cineplex marquee: HONEY I SHRUNK BATMAN GHOSTBUST II KARATE KID III DEAD POETS GREAT BALLS. These are the fragments he innocently shores against his ruin, the kind of details that historians millenniums hence will cherish. Even his loopiest private opinions carry the whiff of theological profundity. Months into the Bush Administration, Rabbit misses Reagan: "The powerful thing about him as President was that you never knew how much he knew, nothing or everything, he was like God that way, you had to do a lot of it yourself...
...author, was that he pandered too glibly to the natural cynicism of the disaffected young. He was too quick, it was said, to detect the smell of society's insulation burning -- and to sigh "So it goes" -- when there was nothing more in the air than, say, a harmless whiff from a distant war or the neighborhood toxic-waste dump. No more; his news in Hocus Pocus is that our charred insulation no longer smolders. It has burned itself out, and civilization's great, tired machine is not dying, but blackened and dead...
...literary figure of real standing who brings a whiff of hard-core Russian nationalism into the Presidential Council
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in the 16th century, Britain became famous for its merchant adventurers, bold entrepreneurs who sailed to the ends of the earth in search of wealth. If that wealth happened to be taken from a Spanish treasure fleet, or if there was a whiff of privateering and freebootery about their operations, that was all part of the game...