Word: descendance
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...particularly awesome beast, at least in Bartram's description: "Behold him rushing from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail, brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder." Nonetheless, when Bartram's cockleshell of a boat was attacked by a giant alligator on a Florida lake, the naturalist beat at it with a club "until he withdrew sullenly and slowly into the water, looking at me and seeming neither fearful...
...sent her on a visit to London, where she arranged for publication of her work. Her poems, often on religious or patriotic themes, occasionally lapse into sentimentality. It is also apparent that her favorite reading is Pope's translation of Homer. Within this idiom, which can so easily descend to jog trot, she frequently so descends. But in all fairness it must be admitted that no other poet currently writing in the Colonies does much better...
Oceaneering has grown largely because of technological innovations that enable its divers to descend as far as 1,000 ft.-a depth that was rarely attempted a few years ago. It has developed, among other items, a complex fiber glass "rat hat" that warms the helium-oxygen mixture that divers must breathe at the very cold depths below 200 ft. to avoid the disabling nitrogen narcosis commonly known as "rapture of the deep." The $2,500 hat has been successfully tested at 1,600 ft.; Oceaneering refuses to sell it to anyone-even the U.S. Navy, which has chastised...
Thrones and Colossi. To move from the grand volumes and rhythmical, steely incision of these Tlingit house posts and Eskimo masks into the world of American neoclassical sculpture is to shift to provincialism. It is also to descend from necessity into sentiment, and, in a sense, from confidence into anxiety. Compared with the pressure of ritual meaning in the best Indian art, the search for a language of classical form and Roman gravitas conducted by the professionals who rose to commemorate the American ideal after the Revolution-Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford-looks curiously wistful. Hiram Powers...
...semi-meaningless maxims (of Rubin, "He is Jimmy Connors deciding to be Chrissie Evert, as solemn as an oil rig;" of Canada, "a New Zealand on rubber wheels." Leonard must have some idea what these things mean). It also sometimes produces really good and perceptive lines (writers "will descend into pulpdom, where the libidinal cathexes are so simpleminded it seems that anyone with a grudge against women has a chance to make money.") Maybe Leonard has watched too much TV, or thinks too much about beefing up his chapter in Familiar Quotations, but at least he's in there plugging...