Word: whim
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...case, the Justices might rule in their favor. Their disappointment last week was shared by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "Juries are permitted to target unpopular defendants, penalize unorthodox or controversial views, and redistribute wealth," she wrote in a dissenting opinion. "Multi-million- dollar losses are inflicted on a whim...
...nothing indicates that public support for the war is a whim. Having been chastised in the past for the restlessness and impatience with which | their nation conducts its affairs, the majority of Americans seem to regard the battle as a duty that must be borne. There is little war fever that could turn into panic in the face of a temporary setback. If the public changes its mind, it would be only after the war bogged down in an inconclusive quagmire...
...Hollywood's taste for melodrama, you could see Clarice as an apt emblem of women in American movies. Patronized and endangered. Deemed too small, too soft to show muscle at the box office. Working -- or, more often, not working -- at the whim of the men who make the movies. According to the Screen Actors Guild, only 29.1% of all feature-film roles in 1989 went to women. The average male SAG member earned 60% more than the average female; of actors in their 50s, men earned 150% more. "It looks to me as though females get hired along procreative lines...
...mansion in Ann Arbor, Mich., which he had intended to be the keystone in a development of exceedingly expensive mansions designed by eminent architects. The pizza tycoon, who is shifting his attention toward charitable works, felt he could no longer justify spending so much on a personal whim. Said he: "I began thinking, 'My gosh, am I building this out of pride, or what?' " Humility has its limits: he plans to keep his multimillion-dollar auto collection...
...operation so vividly bungled in the best-selling The Russia House (1989). That fiasco was not Ned's fault, to be sure, but he has been punished by his Service superiors anyhow, unplugged from the power loop and farmed out to teach spycraft to young recruits. On an inspired whim, Ned manages to lure his old mentor, George Smiley, out of retirement to spend an evening talking with these students. As the legendary Smiley reminisces aloud about the past history of the Service, Ned finds himself privately doing the same...