Word: paroxysms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...would the Postal Service be the only company in the U.S. that's unaffected by inflation? People fly into a paroxysm when their postage goes up, and they see it as a sign of inefficiency. I guess a quarter to 29 cents is a lot easier to understand than a $500 billion savings and loan bailout. I am just amazed. Everything else goes up. Postal rates will go up. But people have every right to expect that they ((the rates)) should go up at less than the rate of inflation and relatively infrequently. Certainly this increase in February doesn...
During the roaring 1980s, it appeared that New York might slip by. High finance and a booming real estate market transported New York to a paroxysm of unbridled capitalism, with all its attendant glitz and excess. At the height of the bull market, 60,000 new jobs were being created annually, luring droves of hyperambitious baby boomers to the canyons of Wall Street and midtown Manhattan. Nicknamed "the Erector set," a stable of real estate developers transformed the cityscape, throwing up 50 million sq. ft. of glistening office monoliths within Manhattan alone. New fortunes upended the city's social lineage...
...still less universal than hands and eyes. So even as we become unwitting James Joyces -- coining neologisms by the minute -- when we essay a foreign language, we also become Marcel Marceaus: asking the way to the rest room with our eyebrows or sending back the squid with a paroxysm of mock pain. Ask a man in Tierra del Fuego to point you to The Sound of Music, and he'll instantly reply, "No problem!" (which, in every language, means that your problems are just beginning). Then he'll direct you to the Julie Andrews musical that the Argentines call...