Word: descent
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ABOUT A CENTURY ago, Friedrich Nietzsche made some terrifying predictions about the fate of man. He foresaw man's descent into a despicable creature--the last man, a beast whose only goal is comfortable self-preservation...
...rate of descent into this wretched condition picked up noticeably some 20 years ago here in America. Around that time, hedonists and idealists converged as flower children and whined about giving peace a chance. When John Lennon imagined a world in which there was "nothing to kill or die for, no religion too," etc., this descent was, as modern political scientists say, "institutionalized...
...late, the descent has become a veritable free fall. I realized this a few months ago when I came across a slogan at once simple and profound, a slogan which defines The Great Ambition of our age. The slogan, the ambition, is, of course, safe...
...Humboldt. An author's weave of truth and invention is difficult to unravel, and never more so than in a semiautobiographical work like The Bell Jar, which was first published in Britain in 1963, just a month before Plath committed suicide. The story of a young woman's descent into madness spoke to the rising women's movement as well as the romantic instincts of the college generation, and when the novel appeared in the U.S. eight years later, Plath became a cult figure...
...considering the geographic origins of the 147 people, the biologists were even able to determine where Eve lived: samples from those of sub-Saharan African descent showed the most intragroup differences, implying that their mtDNA had had more time to change and thus that their ancestors arose earliest. This finding plus the structure of the family tree indicated sub- Saharan origin, a conclusion that agrees with current archaeological and anthropological theory...