Word: begat
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...responsible for the bug we call Y2K? Conventional wisdom goes something like this: back in the 1950s, when computers were the size of office cubicles and the most advanced data-storage system came on strips of punched cardboard, several scientists, including a Navy officer named Grace Murray Hopper, begat a standard programming language called COBOL (common business-oriented language). To save precious space on the 80-column punch cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year. It was the middle of the century...
Just as the Clintons moved into the White House, Mondale's life started looking up. Having moved back to L.A., she got a job at E! cable channel on the now-defunct show "Q&E!," and moved swiftly to her own weekly series called "Uncut." Success begat success, and Mondale started hosting other cable shows such as "Cyberlife" and "Sex on the Great Barrier Reef." During the President's first term, she returned to the White House several times and was spotted jogging with Clinton -- once, in March 1996, while Hillary and Chelsea were in Bosnia...
...then, in a way, he was. As Tom Butters, the athletic director of archrival Duke, said last week, "Coach Smith made college basketball better. Excellence begets excellence." The lineage of basketball is even more specific. James Naismith, literally the father of the game, begat Phog Allen, the Kansas coach, who begat Dean Smith, who begat not just Jordan and scores of NBA players but also such notable coaches as Billy Cunningham, Larry Brown, George Karl, Roy Williams and Eddie Fogler. Almost all his former charges remain intensely loyal to him. Jordan, in fact, still wears his blue Tar Heel shorts...
What's missing in U Turn is a window into Stone's '60s obsession, which begat his Vietnam trilogy, The Doors and JFK. But all that and more are in A Child's Night Dream, an autobiographical fantasy written in 1966-67. The book's Oliver follows the road of Stone's busy young life and often guns into the overdrive of desire (a meeting with Julie Christie) and horror (vivid images of a war he had not yet fought in). With punch-drunk punctuation and verbs-a-poppin' prose, Stone imitates Joyce, Kerouac, Mailer...
...have trouble keeping the habits straight in any case. Covey's teaching is, to put it mildly, highly schematic. The 7 Habits begat the three primary laws of love, which are not to be confused with the four primary laws of life. There are four unique human gifts and three common mistakes and...but who's counting? A reader who can hack through this verbiage will realize soon enough that it serves only to obscure old-fashioned notions that have sustained families since they first wandered out of the Serengeti. Think before you speak. Plan ahead...