Word: wrought
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nervous fiddling in Bonn was nothing compared with the havoc wrought in East Berlin. In hindsight it is clear that the fall of the Berlin Wall was due not to strategic planning, but to a sudden loss of nerve. A single ambiguous sentence uttered at a press conference, a mere slip of the tongue, was enough to start an avalanche. The unification of Germany was set off not by grand design but by a blunder...
Though sweeping, the actual transformations wrought by computers and mass communications have been more subtle than predicted. Between 1860 and 1980, the proportion of the U.S. economy derived from information processing and communications rose from 7% to more than 50%, creating a demand for a new type of worker. Computers and communications equipment do not require strength or aggressiveness, and this has helped transform the role of women in industrial societies. These changes go on today at the edges of the information age. In New Guinea, for example, rural men skilled in warfare and hunting are by turns mystified...
...leaded-glass lamps displayed in "Masterworks" radiate a ragtime glow -- magnolias, maple leaves, dragonflies and cobwebs are set atop finely wrought bronze bases. Viewed together, however, they overwhelm a modern eye, a sort of kaleidoscopic overdose. Tiffany would perhaps have been embarrassed by such a showing of his lamps. He considered them rankly commercial and beneath his talents. They were, however, a convenient way to use up the several tons of glass chips and shards remaining from his monumental windows. At his 68th birthday party, where more than 160 examples of his art were displayed, Tiffany exhibited only one lamp...
...result of a proprietor's quirky, untutored taste, or a printer's feeling that Garamond was a classy typeface, or a general notion that things had always been done that way. Today practically everything is designed. Record-album covers and annual reports and dog-food labels are self-consciously wrought and overwrought, fussed with endlessly to get the connotations just right. This very page, with its six typefaces in ten sizes and thin horizontal and vertical rules and several photographs, did not come about by accident but as a calculated compromise among the competing demands of marketing, expediency, tradition...
...prepared him well for his current position as a senior writer. In crafting the main story in this week's special section on the Soviet Empire, Nelan drew from his experiences in Moscow from 1978 to 1981. Leonid Brezhnev was in charge, and the reforms that Mikhail Gorbachev later wrought were unimaginable then. "I understand the stage on which the recent changes are occurring," says Nelan, "but often I am completely amazed by the script...