Word: lavishness
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...sybaritic pleasures, used his billions in royalties to drag the once backward country from the 10th into the 20th century. Without collecting a dinar of taxes from Kuwaitis, he wiped out unemployment in a land of underfed illiterates, created an elaborate school system and the world's most lavish welfare state, rebuilt the mud brick capital city of Kuwait into a tidy little air-conditioned marvel of modern office buildings and apartments and tree-lined boulevards...
...most modern of literary conventions, of fairly recent approval, permits sexual play or sexual passion to be described in lavish detail, in four-letter as well as polysyllabic words, in fiction. But a certain reticence and circumlocution, for obvious reasons, is still demanded in the public prints, on radio and on television. Last week British Critic Kenneth Tynan, who doubles as literary director of Britain's National Theater, decided to test that convention and found it still intact...
From parachutes he moved on to the quintessential custom car, the dragster, whose only purpose is to accelerate over a quarter-mile straightaway to speeds in excess of 200 m.p.h. "Only an incredibly sophisticated people," he says, "would lavish expensive attention on things of such limited use." He portrayed the goggled drivers with hand-painted benday dots to make them look like newspaper photographs...
...social worker among Africans; and Gordon Waddell, 28, Scots stockbroker; in a glittering ceremony in Johannesburg's St. Mary's Cathedral, outside of which jostling crowds of wildly cheering blacks and whites were kept at bay by police using walkie-talkies and Alsatian dogs, followed by a lavish reception attended by 1,000 members of the white elite...
...results were as confused and kaleidoscopic as the process itself. Across from the lavish Hotel Indonesia, a sign showing a jowly Uncle Sam with a dagger at his throat had quietly disappeared. "It was the wind," explained grinning Indonesians. Near the reeking kali-kali (canals) off Merdeka Square, Moslem youth groups in straw hats drilled where young Communists once sang their favorite anthem: America, Satan of the World. Through the capital's dusty, palm-studded streets, army patrols quietly rounded up minor Red officials and led them off to secluded firing squads. And on walls, fences and curbstones blazed...