That is what happened in the U.S., for example, after Word War II, and again during the Clinton years.

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Winston Churchill, Britain's leader during Word War II, looking back to his days as an imperial policy-maker, used to say he created Jordan with a stroke of the pen one Sunday afternoon.

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In 1942, the company dropped the word silk since there was an embargo on silk during World War II.

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And 90-year-old Victor Borge left his native Denmark at the start of World War II and arrived in New York in 1940 not knowing a word of English.

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The written word, however, only emerged about 5, 000 years ago, and until World War II over half the world's population couldn't read or write.

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Next from his word processor: The story of an American chasing a renegade SS officer across the wreckage of post-World War II Germany.

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