Word: wonk
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mountains are leonine, the natives are taciturn and venal, the sunsets are red, and in the early evenings you can hear, from the shores of the lake, the brave and innocent voices of little children, singing some gibberish song about what a wonderful time they're having at Camp Wonk-a-tonk...
Mostly, though, Babbitt excelled by mastering the details, concentrating on them to the point of becoming something of a policy wonk. Even now, in the crucible of a presidential campaign, he manages to read widely and thoroughly, especially on foreign affairs and economics. Says Rob Smith, a Sierra Club official who has worked closely with him, "In negotiations, he is always the best-informed person at the table, so he usually wins...
...quiet, self-described "wonk" (Kaku says that's "know" spelled backwards) while at Harvard, Kaku played trumpet in the Harvard Band and enrolled in two graduate courses as a sophomore. By his junior year, he had run out of courses to take...
...College aggressively seeks to attract students from all regions and back grounds with a wide variety of interests and skills both to enhance and to brighten the undergraduate experience and for socially strategic reasons. It is as a result of this policy that there are jock or preppie or wonk Houses. With its Core Curriculum, the College has tried to broaden the minds of its students and insure that they emerge with more than highly specialized knowledge. But when these praiseworthy practices are applied to House and social life, they cease to be admirable and become forms of social engineering...
What constitutes the Princeton definition of "wonk" at Bickertime? The traits of a varied species can be most clearly grasped when combined into an extreme, idealized archetype, whose full obnoxious character each empirical individual but partially manifests and only for a brief time. To apprehend the Platonic essence, then, of the utter antithesis to the approved club type, imagine an inarticulate, introverted, morbidly shy sophomore from a small town in the provinces. He wears outlandish ties, dirty sweaters, and baggy pants. Not only lacking a crew cut, he is in bad need of a barber nearly all the time...