Word: quien
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Children play games of musical chairs. Teenagers play games of chicken. And adults make jury-rigged deals to launch expensive, redundant cable-TV channels. What else is one to make of the panic and quien-es-mas-macho giddiness variously gripping all of television's big boys right now? It's just the latest chapter in the ongoing struggle between the broadcasters -- NBC, ABC, Fox, CBS, their hundreds of affiliate stations -- and the cable-TV operators, but this time the frenzy is particularly intense and farcical, the ironies especially rich, the broadcasters wussier and the cable industry more bullying than...
...more than twice the initial forecast. "The stimulus fight will look like a picnic compared with health care," says a Clinton aide. "But everything's possible if we include everyone in. On the other hand, nothing's possible if we continue to turn every disagreement into some kind of Quien es mas macho? thing. The President can do it if he wants to, and I'm sure he will." Why? "Because at this point he has no choice...
Punctuation thus becomes the signature of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to be revealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ("Caramba! Quien sabe?"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-called inscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the '60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Glo italics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State is absolute, the dignity -- and divinity -- of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, Sub-Committees...
...hard facts with a resonant ring, few can match the one dredged up by Rieff: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot had its U.S. premiere at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in 1956. Quien es Godot? Quien sabe? The play is a masterpiece about waiting and making everything from nothing, a feat, these literary carpetbaggers convince us, that is not uncommon in Miami...
...sets into plain language such technical phrases as slice (knife wound) and to slip on the heat (v., trans; to shool a person, especially to death). Sociologists specializing in higher strata may find more help in the Who's Who of Polish Americans, Librarians, Texans, or even the Argentinian Quien en Quien. Detrett's Peerage, Baronetage, Knightage, and Companionage provides excellent pictures of family crests' and advertisements of tea-biscuits...