For
the better part of the last century, the area's population makeup
It was a process chased by metallurgists and steel makers throughout
the better part of the 20th century.
"Hopefully we'll have a fairly large program on the ice this winter; we're anticipating having four drills this winter for
the better part of two months or more."
Naturally this meant, as they went on to tell me, that although they'd been nothing less than supportive of my sexual preference for
the better part of a decade, they hadn't told their friends that I was a euphemism-or at least not, as they say, "in so many words."
Armed with a tape recorder, camera, an understanding of Homestead's recorded past, and a commitment to listen, Judith Modell and Charlee Brodsky spent
the better part of a decade, beginning in 1986, attempting to understand the complex ways in which steelworkers, their families, and townspeople responded to the crisis wrought by deindustrialization.
I've never known anyone to live in such secrecy." That habit for private living remained with Cadmus to the last; he told me, just a year before he died, that he was glad that
the better part of his life story was not documented, since he wanted such details to stay private even after his death.
The reform Jewish synagogue, invariably known as, simply, the Temple, had stood in "pillared, domed majesty" on a grassy him above Peachtree Street for
the better part of a century when someone mined it with 50 sticks of dynamite, blowing out the white marble and red brick walls, destroying offices and Sunday school classrooms, flapping the stained-glass windows "like tablecloths shaken after dinner." An hour later, a caller claiming to be "General Gordon of the Confederate Underground" told a wire service reporter, This is the last empty building in Atlanta that we will bomb.
For
the better part of five years, from his inauguration in January 1969 to my departure from Washington journalism in the summer of 1973, 1 covered Richard Nixon's Presidency for The Progressive.
A buffer between inhospitable rock and nutrient-seeking life, they transform sunlight into
the better part of the world's daily diet.
Europe, which for
the better part of the last 50 years was regarded as comprising the countries west of the "Iron Curtain," has changed its "borders." It now encompasses just about everything west of Moscow--a considerably greater tract of land to draw upon--where new fortunes have been made.
"We're not sure what the future holds, and the reaction is people's lives have been on hold for
the better part of 16 months."
DISCRETION WAS CLEARLY NOT
THE BETTER part of valor for Oscar Wilde.