Word: commonest
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...commonest argument I’ve heard on behalf of these inanities is that they help people to assure themselves they have, in fact, done the reading. As such, we should not hold them to any higher standard than absentminded doodling. The poet Collins ultimately comes to a similar conclusion: “We have all seized the white perimeter as our own / and reached for a pen if only to show / we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; / we pressed a thought into the wayside, / planted an impression along the verge...
...says, “a small, trivial, rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use, it’s just wanting in—what shall I say? Well, dignity, or the least approach to distinction...
...sample of etymologist Eric Partridge's "vulgar dictionary" contained the commonest four-letter words, but they were masked with asterisks. The fun came in definitions of such obscure but piquant phrases as Back Gammon Player, Brother of the Gusset, Fire Ship, Irish Whist, Nogging House, Pushing School, Scotch Warming Pan and Whiffles. I suppose they might have raised a giggle from the youth of Olde England or 60s Middle America, but kids of the latter era were getting naughtier word play from Ian Fleming. Remember Pussy Galore...
...many ways just as ignorant about the scientific facts of reproduction as they were in the days when Doris Day, not Madonna, was their idol. In a study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Demographer Ellen Kisker of Princeton University found that teenage girls are awash in misinformation. Among the commonest myths: that they could not become pregnant the first time they had sex, if they had it only occasionally or if they had it standing up. Adolescents are especially foggy on the subject of contraception. A National Opinion Research Center survey of teenage mothers found that few were familiar with...
According to the most recent statistics, almost 30% of U.S. abortions are performed on teenagers. Abortions seem to be commonest among the affluent. "Upper-middle-class girls look at abortion as a means of birth control," says Myra Wood Bennett, a county health official in southern Illinois. The poorer girls, she notes, simply cannot afford it. Federal funding of most abortions for low-income women was barred by Congress in 1976; only nine states have stepped into the breach, providing for abortions without restrictions...