Word: flatly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...begins in early 1963 with failed and sometimes bizarre CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. U.S. readers are sufficiently detached from the Cuban strongman to see this as comedy, perhaps. But the plot winds on to include the assassination of President Kennedy, and the novel's cheerful inventions fall flat. The old horror of November 1963 floods across the pages, and the author's paper heroics for the first time seem chattery and idle...
...taxes on Social Security benefits for couples earning more than $32,000 a year. "Just as we have had progressive income taxes, we should have progressive Government benefits," Babbitt explains. "Why should the Mellons and the Vanderbilts get the same benefits as a widow living in a cold-water flat?" While cutting entitlement spending, Babbitt would impose a 5% "consumption" tax, basically a national sales tax, which would exempt necessities like food...
...lawyer). Gorbachev's phraseology is not remarkable, or at least does not read well in translation. The English version of Perestroika, published in the U.S. just before the December summit, is blandly general. But in a Gorbachev speech, as TV viewers around the world have discovered, phrases that seem flat on the printed page suddenly come to life...
...confuse our need to judge." Some jobs brought a prisoner an added ration of soup, perhaps the difference between starvation and survival. Levi absolves the sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, lice checkers and bed smoothers, those "who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square." Mercy is more strained for the Kapos, who were in charge of barracks and work details and whose own lives frequently depended on the ferocity they displayed toward their fellow prisoners. Throughout the Reich, the Nazi system spawned flunkies of almost opera-bouffe dimensions. The megalomaniacal Chaim Rumkowski...
...Nash's Regency terraces, Inigo Jones' Banqueting House, John Soane's Bank of England and Wren's churches were juxtaposed with discordantly cheap, gray cement-and-glass office boxes and grim "purpose-built" public housing that sprouted in craters left by German V-bombs. Squares and courtyards were bulldozed flat. Planners who felt that London was too dense and dark decided that new buildings should reach up high in search of light. They rose, in fact, to the 52-story, 600-ft. level of the NatWest Tower, dwarfing the 365-ft.-high St. Paul's dome. According to Gavin Stamp...