Word: yank
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course, one can always try the American approach and pretend to ignore the past entirely. Jews have generally taken the opposite tack: to yank the past into the present so forcibly that time has virtually no demarcations. Part of the Passover ritual is the exhortation that everyone in each generation feel he personally has just gone out of Egypt. The presentness of death is a central element of Judaism. The various prayers of lamentation, the practice of shivah (the seven-day period of mourning), the published announcements of grief, all lie at the heart of a faith that looks solely...
...this homey and tenuous network tore apart, and the town with it, when the new owner, the Oxford County Telephone & Telegraph Co., announced it was replacing crank with dial. Before you could say d.a., a "Don't Yank the Crank" committee was formed. T shirts displaying that motto went on sale in Brad Hooper's village store. There were town meetings and more town meetings. Lawyers were hired, and briefs got filed with the public utilities commission to prevent the conversion to dial, and even void the sale...
...politics, the crank phone has been added as a topic requiring the utmost diplomatic discretion. "Some people have got the idea I'm carpetbagging on them," says Hathaway. But nobody speaks more affectionately of Elden than Alice Johnson, the chair of the Don't Yank the Crank committee, who came to Bryant Pond twelve years ago as an art teacher in the elementary school. She married another outsider and settled down in a handsome mid-19th century home by the lake. A Cuisinart and a microwave oven share the house with her crank phone...
Smith was most at home at the race track, even as "a slightly bewildered Yank" visiting Ascot. "Half the royal family was on the premises," he writes in 1960, "and horseplayers were being so polite their teeth hurt." He savors "the soft afternoons under the old elms of Saratoga" and the memories of great races, like the 1941 Preakness: "Whirlaway came loping along counting the house with Arcaro sitting still as a bluepoint on the half-shell." To Smith, horses are people with four legs and wonderful names. What a pleasure to learn that a colt by the French stallion...
Summits remind most thoughtful people that American nuclear forces contain the Soviets, that American carriers guard the trade routes and even that British Harriers in the Falklands fire American Sidewinder missiles. The real is sue in this European extravaganza is U.S. leadership. Ronald Reagan seems to understand. A Yank who has a prairie heritage, has a beautiful wife in rhinestones and knickers, and is fun at a dinner party has a lot going for him. The very for Reagan can do is go out as he did in the old days to win one for the Gipper. He was doing...