Word: specious
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...remain perennially susceptible to New Year's Eve's specious allure, annually convinced that next year's shebang may somehow be different. And when it comes to the pathos of impossible expectations, there's never been anything like this: New Year's Eve Y2K. The millennium, baby! The expectations for this year's gala are pathologically high. An apocalyptically giddy time is expected to be had. We seem to be demanding nothing less than a cosmic collision of the dimensional trajectories of time and space in which, for one amazing instant, the entire universe becomes an unimaginably immense T.G.I. Friday...
...there was Lenny Bruce, and given the numerous calls today for the South Park brat and his ilk to clean up their act, the TV premiere of this Oscar-nominated documentary couldn't be better timed. Narrated by Robert De Niro, it follows the artistic evolution and downfall through specious obscenity prosecutions of the "dirty" comic. Bruce died of a 1966 drug overdose, but he comes to smoldering, indomitable hipster life here...
Looking for the sunny, specious hucksterism of the campaign trail? Step right up--Hillary will give it to you. This year's model is advertised as new and improved--less formidable and more fun, tenderized by a year of public humiliation, performing the silly rituals that campaigns are made of (hefting Hank Aaron's bat at the Baseball Hall of Fame, tucking into barbecue at a local rib joint) and loving them. Though one can't help suspecting that she sometimes feels she's slumming, she never lets it show. No doubt she is genuinely enjoying this moment of stepping...
Moreover, for the House to occasion a trial in which Monica S. Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and other specious characters would take the stand in front of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist would be to drag this nation, weary of scandal and partisan posturing, through the mud for much...
...rankings have also become enormously controversial. Among the schools critical of the system are members of U.S. News's own top-25 club: Berkeley, Tufts, Rice, M.I.T. and Wesleyan. Critics rally around Stanford president Gerhard Casper's censure of the "specious formulas and spurious precision" of the lists. What is wrong, many say, is that the conclusions are based too much on input--the current reputation of each school and the attributes of incoming students. More helpful, they say, would be a measure of output--what consumers (that's what applicants really are) are likely to get in exchange...