Word: commoner
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...some West African villages it is common to see children leading their blind elders to the fields, where they serve as human scarecrows. With eyes full of parasitic worms and skin covered by itchy nodules, the adults suffer from onchocerciasis, a disease that afflicts 18 million people in the developing world and permanently blinds 500,000 each year. The worms are spread by black flies, which breed near fast-flowing tropical streams -- hence the name river blindness. Last week New Jersey-based Merck & Co. announced that it will begin distributing ivermectin, a drug that halts onchocerciasis, to affected countries...
...continued. The next day, U.S. Steel declared an extra dividend, the market took heart and the Times industrials gained 31 points. John D. Rockefeller, now 90, announced his optimism: "Believing that fundamental conditions of the country are sound . . . my son and I have for some days been purchasing sound common stocks." Retorted Comedian Eddie Cantor: "Sure, who else had any money left...
Data and media were plurals pure and simple in RHD-I; the new edition advises that data can be either singular or plural, and media as a singular has become common in, of all places, the media. Another favorite media word, kudos, has undergone an even more perplexing transformation. Originally a singular meaning praise or glory, it has been misconstrued so often as a plural that, by a process lexicographers call back-formation, it has spawned a synthetic singular. Sure enough, here it is with its own entry in RHD-II: kudo. What next? Will a single instance of pathos...
...show -- cramped and arrhythmic though its installation is -- without being deeply moved. Just as Lucian Freud's exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington shows up the dinginess of most American figure painting in the '80s, so Stella's fearless panache and the profusion of his output refute the common idea that the possibilities of abstract painting are played out. From the fascist lugubriousness of early striped paintings like "Die Fahne hoch" to the galvanic dance of fake-shadowed solids in the Cones and Pillars series of the '80s, from the decorative pastelly flatness of the late-'60s Protractors...
...realizes that they mark the end of its tradition with a barrage of fireworks: there is something funereal as well as celebratory about the sight. It seems improbable that anyone (other, perhaps, than Stella) will manage to wring more from the constructivist impulse. If you want to see the common ancestor of these frenetic and space- grabbing objects, it is upstairs at MOMA, a little thing of rusty tin: Picasso's 1912 Guitar. Thinking about Picasso, Stella had come to realize that "it's not the presence of a recognizable figure in Picasso that in itself makes things real...