Word: distinctive
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...days, it transforms itself like some buggy version of Terminator 2. Its nerves and muscles melt and reform with astonishing speed until the new adult mosquito sloughs the pupal skin, emerges at the surface and takes off. If one thinks of the humble, fishy mosquito larva as a distinct animal in its own right, then it is one of God's creatures for which resurrection and afterlife are scientific facts. Instead of dying, it sprouts wings and ascends into the heavens...
Using biochemical tools that were not available at the beginning of the epidemics in Africa and the Americas, molecular biologist Chin-Yih Ou and his colleagues at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found two distinct epidemics caused by somewhat different strains of HIV in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. Both epidemics started no more than four years ago, but one occurred mostly in intravenous drug abusers and the other started in female prostitutes. There was little overlap between the two groups...
...building." From the small Roman colony known as Barcino founded circa 15 A.D., to the present Olympic-banner festooned metropolis, Hughes carefully recovers the past through an anecdote-laced archaeology. What surfaces is a sense of Barcelona, and the region known as Catalunya which surrounds it, as a distinct cultural and political entitywithin the much larger Iberian peninsula...
...autonomy lie embedded deeply within its lexical past. Contrary to popular belief, Catalan is not a bastardized version of Castilian, but a proper language in its own right. When the Romans conquered the Iberian peninsula, as Hughes tells us, they brought with them, two kinds of Latin from two distinct socio-economic classes. While the Roman elite went south to the silver mines (and hence, the money), the Roman farmers and laborers settled in the fertile northern regions, bringing their more modern, "slangy" Latin with them...
They are the disputatious representatives of a larger, basically positive phenomenon: a devolution of power not only upward toward supranational bodies and outward toward commonwealths and common markets but also downward toward freer, more autonomous units of administration that permit distinct societies to preserve their cultural identities and govern themselves as much as possible. That American buzz word empowerment -- and the European one, subsidiarity -- is being defined locally, regionally and globally all at the same time...