Word: avuncular
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sweepstakes, Hitler runs a distant second to Stalin, who sanctioned the deaths of 20 million to 50 million of his countrymen. Nor can Nazism, a brutally simple triumph of the goons, touch the tragic complexities of Stalinism-a political torch fanned by the world's idealists while one avuncular pipe smoker in Moscow was wielding it as a genocidal bludgeon. Certainly Stalin was not typecast as a satanic maniac. Hitler was, and his regime paraded itself as a national theater of cruelty. The black leather and stainless steel, the epileptic rhetoric-these were the props and syntax...
Piano lessons are compulsory. Sex education is an accelerated course in child abuse: a newly arrived immigrant cousin spends himself on Kate's leg; an avuncular friend of her family's gropes her at the movies, and a barber's free hand wanders under the sheet. Years later, Mamma tells her daughter that she had 13 abortions. It was not a neighborhood record...
...accepted Press Secretary Ronald L. Ziegler's public position that it was a "third-rate burglary attempt" involving no White House personnel. At the morning staff meetings, the few references to Watergate were always by junior staff members, who complained of the media's unfairness. The avuncular approval this elicited from Haldeman, who presided, reinforced the sense that nothing serious had occurred...
Clothes may make the man after all. At least, a sweater may warm up his image. CBS Anchorman Dan Rather, 50, who had struck some viewers as chilly after the avuncular Walter Cronkite, took to wearing a sleeveless, V-necked pullover on his newscasts some three months ago. Perhaps not so coincidentally, he has since reclaimed Cronkite's traditional top spot ahead of NBC and ABC. Says Rather: "God knows what would happen if you put a ring in your nose." Without going that far, Rather is prepared to stay bundled up through the summer. "If it takes wearing...
...became pregnant. Bradlee is the daughter-in-law of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee. The Emmy-winning reporter insisted on working up to her delivery date and reported two stories only hours before going into labor. In fact, the station's news director, James Thistle, had decided out of avuncular concern that Bradlee should avoid trips in the station's helicopter. Bradlee was furious and used the whirlybird until two weeks before her due date last January. After six weeks, she was back at work, balancing career and motherhood, and sharing child-care duties with a baby sitter and Husband...