Word: agee
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Haile Selassie, a friend of his late father's, invited him to attend his coronation. The feudal pageantry of the occasion has been described with condescending vividness by Evelyn Waugh, then a correspondent for Fleet Street. By contrast, Thesiger notes sadly that during his absence of eleven years "the age-old splendour of Abyssinia" had been fading. The Emperor's bodyguard wore khaki; the palace secretaries were in tailcoats. Thesiger met the celebrated author of Vile Bodies and found him foppish and petulant. He refused Waugh's request to accompany him on an expedition among the touchy Danakil...
Japan contends that the whale hunt is for scientific purposes allowed under the moratorium. The minke whales, which are not on the endangered-species list, will be dissected to determine their age and reproductive history. Fair enough, but the whale meat produced will turn up at restaurants in Japan. And that, says Commerce Department Spokesman Brian Gorman, "gives rise to concerns that this may be a thinly veiled commercial hunt." The Japanese people cannot understand why killing an unendangered species should cause such a ruckus. "Americans eat beef," they say. "Why can't we eat whale...
Doctors who specialize in treating old people delight in telling the story of a 90-year-old man named Morris who has a complaint about his left knee. Says his exasperated physician: "For heaven's sake, at your age what do you expect?" Rejoins Morris feistily: "Now look here, Doc, my right knee is also 90, and it doesn't hurt." It is an apocryphal tale with a pointed message. As long as anyone can remember, old age and disability have been paired as naturally and inevitably as the horse and carriage or death and taxes. After all, advancing years...
That more cheerful view of growing old is gaining currency mainly because of the rapidly expanding scientific discipline of gerontology. Modern studies of the aging process involve everyone from laboratory researchers examining brain tissue to nutritionists interviewing nonagenarians to physicians specializing | in treating the elderly. The goal of gerontology is not to extend the upper limit of human life -- now about 115 to 120 years of age -- but to make the lives of the elderly less burdensome physically and more rewarding emotionally. "The new focus," says Dr. John Rowe, director of the division on aging at Harvard Medical School...
Although still in its infancy, gerontology has produced major revisions in doctors' understanding of how people grow old. Explains Dr. T. Franklin Williams, director of the National Institute on Aging: "It's the diseases that we acquire in later years that really cause the deterioration of functions." Or, as Dr. Robert Butler of Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City puts it, "Disease, not age, is the villain." The good news is that in many instances, physical disorders that afflict the aging can be effectively treated. Today even multiple afflictions do not necessarily incapacitate a person. Citing...