Word: decorum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...viewpoint is unconventional, so is the man. Horner, 44, teaches at Montana State University and is curator of paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, but he has no knack for academic decorum (administrators at the museum wish the rubber stamp could say, I DON'T GIVE A DARN WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS). He disdains intellectual showboating, describing his own tyrannosaurus as a "media specimen," valuable mainly because it will bring the fang-and-claw set into the museum to see really important stuff, like duckbills tending their offspring. His manner is casual and laconic, which fits with...
...cannot be. But I will dash into the great venture with all that pride and spirit an ancient race has given me." The man's generation, destined for the trenches at Ypres and the Somme, was almost innocent enough to ship off thinking of Horace's lines: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori." Years later, American boys flying to Vietnam sometimes unreeled John Wayne movies in their head. That was the model; that was what a man should look like, act like, when he goes...
...used to be the nurturing guardian of home and hearth? Now if she even knows how to put a roast in the oven, she could sear it with her sarcasm. TV kids have always been mischievous, but now they are bratty and disrespectful as well. Standards of decorum have gone out the window too: Dad burps out loud at the dinner table; a kid snaps photos of his mom shaving her underarms...
...purpose here is not to make a case for a Victorian decorum or for namby- pambyism. The argument is directed to bad dress, bad manners, bad speech, bad human relationships. The hope has to be that calculated sloppiness will run its course. Who knows, perhaps some of the hip designers may discover they can make a fortune by creating fashions that are unfrayed and that grace the human form. Similarly, motion-picture and television producers and exhibitors may realize that a substantial audience exists for something more appealing to the human eye and spirit than the sight of a human...
...demonstrators tore through part of the huge, 3,000-room building complex on Normanenstrasse. In November protesters entered Stasi offices, but only when accompanied by ordinary police and as part of an effort to ensure that records were not destroyed or spirited away. This time there was no such decorum. The invaders ripped through desks and files, shattered windows and upended furniture...