Word: damp
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...into a tumbled heap. But she uses this violent gift in a curiously selective way. At the outset of The Shipping News, she demeans her hero, a blobby, unfocused man named Quoyle, as "a dog dressed in a man's suit for a comic photo," who possesses "a great damp loaf of a body." His faithless wife is "thin, moist, hot . . . in another time, another sex, she would have been a Genghis Khan." After they marry, her "desire reversed to detestation like a rubber glove turned inside out." But as Quoyle heads to Newfoundland and fumbles through life...
...lucky, the Santa Anas, as they are called, merely annoy, ushering in what author Joan Didion has called "the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread . . ." If the state is unlucky, a spark, man-made or natural, will strike the canyon vegetation, thick and green in the damp months but now dried to tinder. The spiky brown chaparral brush will ignite like old Christmas trees, and a canyon will become a fire corridor through which flames roar faster than a man can run, burning at temperatures high enough to melt metal, billowing to start yet more fires $ and driving...
...which increases the stakes, and the risks, for the U.N. Operation Restore Hope pioneered a new type of American military intervention, one driven by humanitarian concern rather than economic or strategic interests. Taking over in Somalia now poses a test case for the ability of the U.N. to damp down the internecine wars, actual and threatened, that have burst out since the end of the cold war. Are the suffering people of Bosnia less deserving of help? Then maybe even some of the strife-torn republics of the former Soviet Union? Perhaps -- if the Somalia mission can actually find...
...bereft of overtime and entertainment allowances, are having to spend time with wives and children they have barely spoken to for years -- sometimes to their mutual shock. Japanese businessmen are traditionally so lost outside their offices and clubs that many a wife refers to a retired husband as a "damp leaf" -- a sticky annoyance to a woman tidying up a walk...
...NCAA championship in the sunny days of May, but for now, it toils in the damp chilliness of March...