Word: basic
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...named Structural Impediments Initiative, which commits Japan to boost spending while the U.S. cuts debt. The agreement will permit Bush and Kaifu to enter next week's seven-nation economic summit in Houston having made progress not just on specific trade issues but also on ways to improve the basic economies of the two countries...
...what are the compensating virtues? For an English speaker, there is only one, but it is quite substantial: basic vocabulary. As linguistic cousins, German and English share a large stock of cognates, words that are spelled alike and mean the same thing -- for example, person, winter and arm. Plenty of words have only slight differences: if you're nervous in English, you're nervos in German. With a little imagination, one can find any number of common roots. Take, for example, the verb to smell: riechen, from the same root as the English reeks. The malodorousness does not exist...
Zorah has many descendants in the artist's mature work, and it is evident that in Morocco Matisse's basic idea of the artist-model relationship crystallized. He began to envision the studio as a kind of harem, where the static and endlessly compliant figure submitted again and again to the pasha- like gaze of her observer...
...there is to all this another dimension. For in speaking a foreign language, we tend to lose years, as well as other kinds of time, to become gentler, more innocent, more courteous versions of ourselves. We find ourselves reduced to basic adjectives, like "happy" and "sad," and erring on the side of including our "monsieurs," and we are obliged to grow resourceful and imaginative in conveying our most complex needs and feelings in the few terms we remember (like a child rebuilding Chartres out of Lego blocks). Think of how English sounds as spoken by Marcello Mastroianni: romantic, suggestive, helplessly...
...reformist colleagues plan to open a computerized apartment-rental service and launch an industrial-commodities exchange to barter needed items among enterprises. They have also called for soup kitchens to help cushion the transition to a market economy. Popov and his city council have not managed basic reforms, but they represent a challenge to Gorbachev simply by being in a position to experiment. Popov is one of the founders of the progressive Interregional Group in parliament, and he has criticized Ryzhkov's reform plan as a "fiction" that would leave "the same whip and fist" in charge. He advocates eliminating...