Word: wondrousness
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...frantic race on both sides to devise offensive missiles that can penetrate or evade such defenses. The prospect is, therefore, that we shall be spending hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, with no perceptible underlying change in the strategic relations between the two countries. Before we pollute the wondrous heavens with the folly of man, surely we should put our heads together to try to find some way to avoid this dismal prospect. As common members of Homo sapiens, perhaps we can also find a way to put our heads together to address some of the urgent problems...
When President Reagan gave that comforting concept vast publicity and his ardent support in his Star Wars speech last March, many scientists complained that the President was far too optimistic about the state of their wondrous arts. Arms-control experts warned that holding out such panaceas diverted attention from the painful chore of negotiating agreements to reduce nuclear weapons. The development of defensive systems, they said, could touch off another arms race, this one in space, and possibly even entice an enemy to attack before the weapons were fully operational...
...easy sniping distance, is the besieged Christian town of Deir al Qamar, scene of a notorious massacre of Christians by Druze in 1860. The Christian militiamen claim there are now 40,000 refugees crammed into the village. In other times, Deir al Qamar would strike a visitor as a wondrous place, with its fountain in a central square and its houses clinging to a steep mountainside. But today it is, as Mayor George Dib Nehme puts it, "like a very small jail with far too many people." He continues: "We have no assurances of food, water or medicine...
...sides of this close-knit life. He frequently underscores the stability and supportiveness of life in the village: in one particularly touching scene, a women called on to testify about Martin's identity lovingly pulls aside his hair to show a scar from a childhood injury. Such intimacy is wondrous, and somewhat disquieting, to urbanities who often don't know their next-door neighbors...
...themselves and wanting to define precisely what the terms of the enterprise are to be. Good luck. The self-made ceremony expresses a kind of romantic individualism (not to say, sometimes, narcissism) that wants to reclaim the event from its bloodless institutional routine and make it mean something wondrous and memorable. Marriage is, one thinks at the start, a long journey. The couple want a bright send-off at the station to think about during those interminable stretches later on, when the landscape becomes as featureless and wearying as the steppe. To write one's own vows...