Word: curious
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Lowell resigned as president, and by curious coincidence, later that year, an anonymous donor came up with the million-odd dollars needed to endow the Society. Upon Lowell's death in 1943, it was revealed that he himself was the mysterious underwriter--"It took nearly all I had," he wrote--and the endowment became known as the Anna Parker Lowell Fund, in memory of the late president's wife...
...some kernels, McClintock began finding curious, quirky patterns of pigmentation. A less imaginative scientist might have dismissed them as natural variations occurring at random. But through painstaking record keeping and careful analysis, McClintock discerned a method in nature's seeming madness. The pigment genes, those causing the splotch es of color on the kernels, were somehow being switched off or on in a particular generation. Still more remarkable, the same "switches" often seemed to crop up a generation later at different places along the same chromosome or even on a totally different chromosome. Indeed, these mysterious "controlling elements...
Elsewhere, Lurie detects a curious connection between the two most publicized American styles, preppie and punk. In their Brooks Bros, and L.L. Bean gear, preppies favor useless buckles on loafers, buttons on Oxford-cloth collars, straps on raincoats and safety pins on kilted skirts. These fastenings strike the author as powerful agents of emotional restraint. Punkers, on the other hand, leave zippers sagging, shirts unbuttoned and wear safety pins through their cheeks as though the flesh itself is literally exploding with rage. The styles may be disparate, Lurie concludes, but "both graphically convey the sense of a world...
Where would gossip be without Elizabeth Taylor? Barely breathing, obviously. Probably no one in the past 30 years has provided better copy or set more tongues wagging. Now, by a curious coincidence, three books have just been published that should give her a permanent place in the Gossip Hall of Fame. The first, Kitty Kelley's Elizabeth Taylor is about the lady herself. The second, Eddie: My Life, My Loves is the autobiography of her fourth husband, Eddie Fisher. The third, Paul Ferris' Richard Burton, is a biography of her fifth and sixth husband. But all are really...
...curious fact was noticed during the Harvard-Yale game, according to a dispatch from New Haven to a New York paper: Just before Yale made her second touch down an engine on the Connecticut River road which stood on a siding near the grounds blew out an immense ring of smoke. It floated over the field a perfect O. As it sailed over the Harvard eleven Yale scored the touch down, and as McClung kicked the goal the ring gradually broke and spread into a distant Y over the Yale team...