Word: cartesian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...features are as austere and regular as a mathematical formula, his carriage as straight as the vertical axis in a Cartesian graph. Teacher John Saxon's eyes are the one variable in the equation: they burn with a visionary gleam. His vision is simple: a future in which the basics of algebra, the building blocks of all higher mathematics, become understandable to all American students...
...overstatement) regarded themselves as the world's master exaggerators: spinners of all tall tales, an abundantly fabulous people, full of Whitman and vinegar. But this is probably mere cultural narcissism. Other people have spent many centuries perfecting their techniques of overstatment. The French for all their Cartesian precision have a strangely unstable hyperbolic side; a casual acquaintance who cannot make it to lunch one day will tell you he is "desolate" because of it. Such linguistic inflation can leave people with their vocabularies depleted when hard times come; what is that man say of his condition...