Word: whim
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Police use traffic violations to apprehend suspected drug runners and bypass the constitutional protection from unreasonable searches and seizures. Because any person who even remotely resembles the stereotypical drug runner can be stopped almost on a whim, this technique can be subject to the most flagrant abuses...
...cameo roles. They may take a year off to work in the theater or have a baby. The easy momentum of the golden age has vanished in an industry where most of the box- office breadwinners are men, and an actress's career rides on an audience's whim. The combustible element used to be star meets star; now it is star finds perfect role. But what if too many good actresses are scrambling for too few good scripts...
Children are born anarchists. Babies reign in the solitary kingdom of ego, unable to distinguish the "I wanna" of whim from the "I gotta" of need. In an age of instant gratification and infant attention span, the popular arts have played to this childish impulse. Heavy-metal rock beats out its primal demands like a child pulling a high-chair tantrum. TV is the baby-sitter of a spoiled kid's dreams: it promises everything, never says no and lets you change the channel if you don't get what you want. And many movies these days are less adolescent...
Kevin, on a whim, decided to run the Boston Marathon with Colleen, who had been training for the event for several weeks. "Typical Kevin move," Colleen says. "He decided the night before that he was going to run it. I beat him by a good 32 minutes...
...meeting was motivated by the long, grinding decline in oil prices that has strapped petroleum-rich countries the world over. A decade ago, when OPEC controlled the bulk of oil output, the group could boost prices at whim. But as OPEC's share of the world's oil market has dwindled, from 56% in 1973 to 33% today, so has the group's control over prices. OPEC has tried to persuade its increasingly productive rivals to limit their output, but they have nonetheless pumped freely and helped swamp the market. They hitherto saw no reason to cooperate with OPEC, since...