Word: begats
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Competing with him for such devilish distinction is Lenin, who snatched from obscurity the 19th century ideology of communism and devised the modern tools of totalitarian brutality. He begat not only Stalin and Mao but in some ways also Hitler, who was enchanted by the Soviets' terror tactics. Doesn't the presence of such evil--and the continued eruption of totalitarian brutality from Uganda to Kosovo--make a mockery of the rationalists' faith that progress makes civilizations more civilized? Isn't Hitler, alas, the person who most influenced and symbolized this most genocidal of centuries...
...Gandhi is not even a member of Parliament. Her chief qualification? Choice of spouse. Her late husband was Rajiv Gandhi, slain Prime Minister, himself the most recent example of India's experiment in monarchical rule within a democratic shell. The line is almost unbroken. The first Prime Minister (Nehru) begat a Prime Minister (daughter Indira) who begat another (son Rajiv). His children being too young to reign, India's Congress Party is proposing what in the Middle Ages was called a regency: let the widow rule...
...there's now only one species of human on the planet, and in the simplified view of evolution most of us have, that's all there has ever been. A few million years ago, most of us think, the half-ape known as Lucy appeared in Africa; eventually she begat a less apelike creature, who evolved in turn into something even more humanlike. Finally, after a few more begettings, Homo sapiens appeared. Except for that odd side branch known as the Neanderthals, the path from proto-apes to modern humans is commonly seen as a succession of new and improved...
...Indeed, Episode I uses its legacy as a crutch. In the midst of an eye-popping "pod race" scene on Tatooine, just as the action promises to run away with the audience, Lucas dribbles in gratuitous allusions to the action-figure world he begat in his youth: Jawas cheer "Utidi!" and sand people fire on the racers like juvenile delinquents. Jabba the Hutt rolls out to preside over the race, as if Lucas' faith in his audience did not extend beyond their vulgar appreciation for references to the previous movies...
...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...