Word: apes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...dash to safety. So, in an inspired gesture, Ramapithecus reached for a rock with both forefeet, reared back on his hind legs and heaved the stone at the predator. Startled to see this usually four-footed prey erect, the tiger cautiously retreated. But the ape-man's triumph was costly. Unaccustomed to the abrupt, upright position, he was left doubled over in agony with a piercing pain in his lower back...
...gives Sabbath a similar flightiness, the nervous soul of a girl who revels in sex and sin. Harry Dean Stanton is properly menacing as the conniving Asa Hawks who wants to torture Haze in a fraudulent game of redemption. Daniel Shor fusses and leaps about hilariously in an ape suit as the deranged Enoch Emery, whose new Jesus is a shrunken South American mummy stolen indiscreetly from the city MVSEVM. And Ned Beatty, the only "name" in the cast, appears fleetingly as the entrepreneurial Hoover Shoats...
Part of the talking-ape lore may come from the subjectivity of researchers. The Sebeoks note that when Koko is asked to give the sign for drink and makes the proper gesture but touches her ear instead of her mouth, Psychologist Patterson assumes not that the gorilla has made a mistake but that it is joking. If Koko smiles when asked to frown, she is displaying a "grasp of opposites." Say the Sebeoks: "Real breakthroughs in man-ape communication are the stuff of fiction...
...baby was "silly and ill-advised," but he agrees that animals are incapable of spontaneous conversation. The Rumbaughs maintain that their more recent experiments preclude the possibility of trainers giving cues, consciously or sub consciously, to the subjects, but they have their own reservations about the linguistic ability of apes. Acknowledges Duane Rumbaugh: "There is no solid evidence to date that would indicate that the ape is ca pable of using syntax with competence...
...whose honor Nim was named, he has no doubts. Says Noam Chomsky: "It's about as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as that there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for hu man beings to teach them...