“On June 6th two journalists were arrested at the state capitol in Madison, WI. I was one of them. I was grabbed by an aggressive and very escalated police officer after walking in to the capitol …”

Escalate means to increase in magnitude or intensity, as “A small conflict has escalated into war.” I haven’t seen escalated applied to a person before. In the example, it means something like “jumpy,” I guess. Or “high,” maybe, but that’s not a condition you normally want to see your policemen in.

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I’d hoped for the headline “Octomom trapped in Carmageddon,” but I never saw it. It could still fit into a title for a made-for-TV thriller on the Syfy channel, though they’d probably juice it up a bit: “Octomom meets Megashark in Carmageddon.”

“A century ago, before the term ‘Third World’ came into use, colonialism was the norm.” Third World came into use after World War II, according to The Cambridge Guide to English Usage, coined in French as tiers monde, to refer to the least developed countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific.

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“It had both political and cultural implications: that the countries concerned were not politically linked with western alliances such as NATO or with the Soviet bloc; and that they had neither an industrial infrastructure nor a high standard of living.

“The term can be explained either by assuming that the Third World is the newest international frontier after the ‘Old World’ (Europe) and the ‘New World’ (North America) — or by the idea that the ‘First World’ and the ‘Second World’ are, respectively, the West and the former Soviet bloc, and the Third World includes all those not aligned to the first two. In the Chinese view, however, they are the Third World. This then requires a further expression, ‘Fourth World,’ for referring to the poorest and most dependent nations of the world.” Afflicted with starvation and “ethnic cleansings,” some seem to be working their way down to Fifth World status.

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