Word: backwards
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Revampers also bent over backward to avoid offending other constituencies. In Have Thine Own Way, Lord, sinners no longer ask Jesus to wash them "whiter than snow," because of objections from blacks. In Wesley's O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, editors originally dropped a verse proclaiming the spiritual uplifting of the "dumb" and the "lame," lest the handicapped take umbrage. They later restored the words, but suggest in a footnote that the stanza may be omitted...
...stops assaulting his guards and quits hurling feces and food at them, he may be moved into more conventional quarters.) His room is lined with Plexiglas, and three video cameras track him constantly. He is so prone to commit mayhem that when a visitor calls, Bosket is chained backward to the inside of his cell door. When the door is swung open, there is Bosket, pinned to the bars like a specimen in a bug collection...
...rulers of the Communist world are reaping the results of decades of propaganda aimed at ensuring control in backward peasant societies. During the early days of the cold war, when it seemed that nothing could contain the virus of Communist expansion, pundits attempted to assure the West that most Marxist regimes took power only with the force of outside arms. On its own, Communism took root only in benighted countries like czarist Russia and feudal China. The more advanced countries of Eastern Europe -- Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland -- had the Marxist-Leninist system thrust upon them on the point of a Soviet...
Although much was made by Western observers of the original vulnerability of backward, predominantly peasant societies to a Marxist takeover, little attention has been paid to the effect of that characteristic on their subsequent development. The Marxist-Leninist regimes of the Soviet Union and China, as well as their variants in Cuba, Albania and North Korea, relied on the peasant mentality of the majority of their populations. Beyond making it possible for well-organized, small revolutionary groups to take power, this attribute also enabled them to consolidate power after the revolution and maintain control as the regime matured...
...most profitable companies on earth. But lulled by the success of Valium, whose U.S. patent expired four years ago, the company failed to keep pace in the '80s with such aggressive rivals as U.S.-based Merck and Swiss neighbors Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy. Symbolic of Hoffmann-La Roche's backward ways was the firm's thinly held stock, the most expensive traded anywhere. In the past year the price of a single share of Hoffmann-La Roche climbed to more than...