Word: detritus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that an English fossil hunter first identified some newly discovered teeth as the detritus of extinct reptiles. (Dinosaur means "terrible lizard" in Greek.) Ever since that time, experts have been squabbling almost as furiously as did the reptiles themselves. In the 19th century, Yale's Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia, the leading collectors in the U.S., feuded so bitterly over fossil sites in the badlands of Wyoming that their teams came close to combat. Today the skirmishing is more genteel, although no less forceful. Some experts, for example, have contended vigorously that dinosaurs must have...
...decides, only one question has real pertinence: What aspects of civilization are worth carrying on? One implicit answer: the ability to wring harmony from dissonance, to create a work of the imagination from disparate and unpromising materials. Example: The End of the World News, a trio made from the detritus of history and scifi...
...tone throughout It Came from Hollywood is one of jolly contempt-an attitude that might better be reserved for such recent films as Hanky Panky, Neighbors, Stripes or any Cheech and Chong picture. The detritus of movie history deserves better; one man's junk is another's priceless antique...
...spectacle on a grand and staggering scale. Napier's set is a kind of automobile graveyard, but it contains far more than discarded tires, battered wheels and disemboweled body parts. He has constructed a collage of the detritus of contemporary civilization: smeared paper plates, unstrung tennis racquets, old Red Seal Victor records, Drambuie bottles and boxes of Tender Vittles. Every object is outsize, as a cat might...
Then there are such historical detritus as F.D.R.'s lap robe; Nazi pilots' socks; a banner from a John L. Sullivan fight; Everett Dirksen's horn-rimmed glasses; a stuffed lion that was the flying partner-when it was alive-of Aviator Roscoe Turner; several white rats, now stuffed, used in a Soviet space shot; leftover Tang from the astronauts; a piece of Plymouth Rock; bricks from China's Great Wall; shards from champagne bottles used to christen battleships; a miniature compass embedded in an acorn from an oak tree that George Washington planted at Mount...