Word: archaicism
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First she polled Harvard and Yale boys, businessmen, wearers of hats, heavy shoes, tight-woven woolens, collars & ties in the dog days. These gentlemen vowed they were quite comfortable, would not admit that their clothes were archaic. Horrified, Hawes (who once fired her obstetrician because he wore a stiff collar) concluded that such clothes were indeed their proper wear...
...paintings at the Valentine Gallery, all done in the last two years, showed a quality which is rare in art and which sometimes starts more enduring fashions than Treasure Hunts: the intelligent mastery and transforming use of a great past style. In this case it was the so-called "archaic" coolness and clarity of form of 16th-century French painting, after the great portraitist, François Clouet. The line in Artist Guevara's pictures seems almost engraved; her forms are firmly rounded, spick-&-span, in cool, grey-blue space. Most impressive: the Seated Young Woman (see cut), plump...
...temporarily for an education at Oxford, where he acquired modern ideas. Back in Indore. a state about the size of Vermont but with 1,300,000 inhabitants (four times as many as Vermont), he built the first air-conditioned palace in India. He did not recondition Indore's archaic tax structure, which gave him one rupee in every three of revenue (estimated annual state income: $5,000,000). Among his reforms have been laws curbing thoughtless extravagance on marriages, and making it illegal for minors to marry...
...fish has very archaic gill flaps and lower jaw, big bony scales covered with enamel, lobed and limb-like fins, a curious double tail divided by a spinal projection. It is a typical member of the Coelacanths, a primitive fish family which first appeared 300,000,000 years ago when the only land animals were amphibians, and which was widespread and flourishing when the Age of Reptiles was just getting under way. The family has been considered extinct for 50,000,000 years because that is the most recent date assigned to any Coelacanth fossil found in the rocks. Thus...
...this "living fossil" creates an evolutionary mystery. In logic its kind should have disappeared when the seas began to be thronged with more modern, more efficient rivals. A plausible theory is that the Coelacanths retreated to the deeps where competition was not severe, and persisted there as the archaic okapi survived in the dense Congo forests, as the primitive duck-billed platypus in benign Australia. If so, some whim or freak of circumstance brought this particular Coelacanth up from the deeps to the coastal water of South Africa. And the possibility remains that other "living fossils" may lurk...