Word: aesopian
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...years public and private scientists have been racing at a blistering pace to decode our full genetic blueprint, or genome. At times, biotech firms, spurred by dreams of giga-bucks, appeared to be in the lead. But like an Aesopian tortoise, the government scientists working with the Human Genome Project have continued pushing along. In November they announced that they had completed mapping the first billion "letters"--or basic chemical units--in our DNA's alphabet...
Gorbachev's opponents are equally aware that much is at stake. The Soviet tradition of unity among all leaders still forbids any direct criticism of Gorbachev's policies. Such debate as does occur is carried on in Aesopian language, and history is currently the favored supplier of code words. Thus when Yegor Ligachev and other conservatives cry that denunciations of Stalin are shaking people's faith in the Soviet system, they are really saying that perestroika and glasnost are going too far. Gorbachev's partisans get the point, and respond with redoubled attacks on Stalin and his admirers today...
History, wrote Gibbon, is little more than a "register of crimes, sorrows and misfortunes." It is, equally often, a study in black ironies or the fatal mechanisms of tragedy. Sometimes history is even a cautionary tale, an Aesopian fable on the folly of blindness or greed or lust. But history is rarely a fairy tale, a narrative that instructs as well as inspires. Still less often is it a morality play, in which the forces of corruption and redemption, of extravagance and modesty collide in perfect symmetry...
...eventually send to the 1980 Democratic National Convention. No matter. For weeks the money, the press, the cameras, the organizers have been pouring into Florida to blanket this nonevent, ensuring that at the very least one of the contenders will emerge grinning with "momentum" and the other with an Aesopian disclaimer that the outcome was, after all, meaningless. Probably both, alas, will be right. TIME Correspondent Richard Woodbury reports...
...process of evolution many species have resolved the problem of violence in a way that man might profitably emulate-or hopefully avoid. In this spirited essay Naturalist Lorenz describes the experience of these species in a natural history of aggression presented as a series of scientifically verified but shrewdly Aesopian fables for our time...