A scratchcard in a 16th birthday card can, for some, be the start of a corrosive, life-long battle.
All illusion, like the sad, corrosive lie that a life-changing jackpot is just one more hand, one more spin of the wheel, one more roll of the dice away.
"The bottom line is that the Chinese don't trust us, and that is having a corrosive impact on life in Xinjiang," said Ilham Tohti, a prominent Uighur economist in Beijing.
In August 2010 I wrote, in a column for i's sister paper The Independent, "Of all the lunacies intrinsic to the era from which we are emerging, none has been as corrosive to national life as the systematic dismantling of academic education for the poor".
After making his directing debut in 2006 with "Fuga," a drama about a tortured musical prodigy, he bounded onto the international stage with a trilogy of distinctive and widely acclaimed films — "Tony Manero" (2008), "Post Mortem" (2010) and "No" (2012) — that amounted to a corrosive critique of life under the Gen. Augusto Pinochet regime.
Partly because, regardless of the corrosive impacts on public life, it wants to keep the system as it is.
The urge to transform everything into compensation is one of the most corrosive aspects of contemporary life, hobbling any attempts to kickstart political activism and a civil society.
The most persistent and corrosive feature of American life over the past three decades is income inequality: it rose steeply during Clinton's first term, and, despite his budget victory, it continued to go up in his second.
The career, on the other hand, is not inspiring, poisoned by paranoia, bombast and an accumulation of lies so corrosive that the 'real life', for that is what Biswell has indeed given us, comes down as something rusty and sadly disposable.
Ask any experienced engineer or designer if they ever wished they could build something cool by themselves without subjecting themselves to the corrosive patronage of corporate life and they'd jump at the chance.
During his address, he criticised a recent republican parade in County Tyrone and said he was "concerned at the way in which the past is exercising a corrosive effect on political life and on community relations" in Northern Ireland.
