Word: plain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fallen in love with a phone. And not a cell phone either, just a plain old cordless phone for your house. Not that there's a single aspect of this phone that's plain or old. In fact, the Uniden ELBT595 exhibits technological advances that ought to put the mobile business to shame...
There is one area of general agreement about what has caused the insurance crisis: plain old-fashioned greed. Ah, but whose greed...
...patronize popular restaurants. They proved so obliging that some restaurant owners in town complained that their establishments were virtually empty. The Icelanders were particularly eager to please when it came to the Hofdi guesthouse, the austere, two-story building where Reagan and Gorbachev met. When Soviet cooks inspected the plain, white bone-china tea service that was to be used to serve Gorbachev, they found it, well, not elaborate enough. The Icelanders and Soviets went on a joint mission to examine three different sets, one of which proved satisfactory to Gorbachev's minions...
...mood, his look. I've been doing that since I was a labor negotiator in California. In Geneva, when the Secretary posed his ideas, I could see that they were based on true belief and the statements that the Soviet Union put out. He really believes them. It was plain to me that I had to answer back just as earnestly about our beliefs. There is no question that he is intelligent, that he is dedicated to their system...
DIED. Rudolf Flesch, 75, unambiguous champion of plain English; of congestive heart failure; in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Vienna-born, he emigrated to the U.S. at 27 and wrote more than 20 books about language and learning, most notably the 1955 best seller Why Johnny Can't Read, which attacked the flash-card school of reading instruction and sparked a resurgence of the more traditional phonetic method of sounding out words syllable by syllable. A readability test devised by Flesch spurred a generation of journalists to write short, uncomplicated sentences but caused critics to complain that his tenets shackled richness...