His people talk about how England has traded imperial confidence for self-consciousness, how attitudes — toward marriage, the household division of labor, even smoking — have devolved over the course of their lifetimes.
As he has for months in prospective campaign stops in the early voting states, and throughout his political career, the former mayor of Burlington, Vermont, on Wednesday assailed an economic system that he said has devolved over the past 40 years and eradicated the nation's middle class.
PARIS — The United States' notions of U.N. sanctions on Iran have devolved over the past months from crippling ones to ones that bite to the currently described smart ones, which although packaged with the words tough and strong might not be hard-nosed enough to cost the mullahs a half-hour's lost sleep.
As many of these festivals have become in the States, this one has devolved over the years into a bizarre combination of the sacred and the profane.
Beginning with peaceful protests during the "Arab Spring" that challenged Assad's autocratic rule, Syria's strife has devolved over the last 32 months into a regional proxy war stoked by sectarian malice.
In the process, what began at the end of the 60s and early 70s as an ostensibly positive search for self discovery, self-realization and self-actualization has devolved over the years to a negative spiral of being self-centered, self-absorbed and self-delusional.
By Friday it was clear that what started as a court case over whether the U.S. government had the legal authority to detain an American man suspected of fighting for ISIS had devolved into an argument over what obligations the U.S. has to ensure his safety upon release.
"It would be a good time to leave Sarcelles before I get a second circumcision," Mr. Kastner says in one of his frequently sarcastic voice-overs, leaving what had devolved into a shouting match on a sidewalk.
By that point, the whole thing had devolved into Howl's Moving Castle b2b Enter the Void, so we're just glad nobody crossed over.
Instead, authority had devolved to homeowners.
It had devolved into name-calling.
