Word: ax
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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From the very beginning, cultural evolution was a social enterprise, mediated by what you could loosely call a social brain. One person invents, say, a flint hand ax; the idea creeps across the landscape, gets improved here and there, and finally, in a distant land, stimulates a whole new idea: axes with handles conveniently attached...
That it took hundreds of thousands of years to get from hand ax to ax with handle suggests that as of 50,000 B.C., during the Middle Paleolithic, the social brain was not humming very vibrantly. There were only 2 million or 3 million "neurons"--a.k.a., people--scattered across the whole planet, and lacking fiber optics or even postal service, they weren't exactly in constant contact...
...folks at McGraw-Hill, who keep the averages, are a secretive bunch. They didn't explain why Laidlaw, an obscure Canadian company, got the ax and Yahoo got in. But one thing is certain. If this index is going to maintain its integrity as a diversified assemblage of our industrial might, there are more Yahoos ahead. They might not all have the same pop as Yahoo, in part because much of Yahoo is closely held. But because of the newness of some of the candidates and how much is owned--and not traded--by venture capitalists, the pickings here could...
...explain it this way," he continues. "When I was living in the woods, there was sort of an undertone, an underlying feeling that things were basically right with my life. That is, I might have a bad day, I might screw something up, I might break my ax handle and do something else and everything would go wrong. But...I was able to fall back on the fact that I was a free man in the mountains, surrounded by forests and wild animals and so forth...
...example, the 22-year-old Macedonian King Alexander charged with his cavalry into the ranks of Persian forces at the Granicus River in what is now Turkey. A Persian soldier clubbed Alexander with an ax, but before he could deal a second and fatal blow, the King's bodyguard killed...