Word: punctilio
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Negotiations can be merely a smokescreen, of course: like the bargaining that the Japanese were conducting with the U.S. before Pearl Harbor. Sometimes negotiations are only empty dances of punctilio: at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, it took the delegates six months to decide in what order they would enter and be seated in the negotiating chamber; the U.S. and North Viet Nam held similarly intricate discussions about the shape of the table in Paris. Negotiations can produce their own tragedies, as Versailles did, as Yalta did. But without negotiation, things tend to fall more quickly of their...
...analysts cautiously awaited voting results from their 7,000 sample precincts, NBC executives decided to use their exit polls as a basis for calling many states rather than wait for any real vote counts. NBC'S reasoning: in a landslide, there is no place for punctilio...
...grand punctilio of high-bosomed dreadnoughts like Emily Post had been unraveling for years, of course. But to many of the young in the '60s, the laid-back luftmenschen of the counterculture, manners were as superfluous as flatware at McDonald's (the late 20th century's reversion to its fingers) or linen napkins at the Donner Pass. To this last half-generation, manners were sexist, hypocritical...
...recent tour of what "Jimmy" thought and what "Jimmy" meant to do. When "Jimmy" was in London for the economic summit, he went out of his way to get on a first-name basis with a difficult character named "Helmut." But West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, with chilly punctilio, insisted on calling Carter "Mr. President." Tass, the Soviet news agency, would have none of the amiable diminutive either; in the course of attacking his human rights policy, Tass has haughtily referred to Rosalynn's husband as "President James Carter...
...ceremony was as determinedly British as it might have been in the era of the Raj. In a singular display of military punctilio, the new field marshal even received a congratulatory cable from the Pakistan army chief of staff, General Tikka Khan, who was military governor of East Pakistan when the war with India began. Like Manekshaw, Tikka Khan is a graduate of the Indian Military Academy, India's equivalent of Sandhurst. It was all, as the British might say, "a jolly good show...