Word: excessive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...could their bulk have been lethal? According to one suggestion that many weekend athletes can identify with, the dinosaurs suffered from slipped disks, which left them unable to forage for food. Great heft could even trigger infertility. In 1946 a paleontologist concluded that because large animals do not shed excess heat as efficiently as small animals do, a temperature increase of just 2 degrees F could have baked the considerable testicles of a ten-ton male dinosaur enough to kill his sperm...
Gloria Sr. was 19 when she gave birth in 1924; less than two years later, Little Gloria's father, Reggie Vanderbilt, died of inadequacy and excess, burned out at 44. Mama, a society beauty with the social conscience of a moth, fluttered from Europe to the U.S. and back again. Little Gloria became a piece of human luggage, shuttled from country places to castles, possessed by magical thoughts: "If I stayed still enough, the motor would start. If I held my breath, the front door would not open . . . I made a bargain with myself not to cry, and then...
...almost mute religiosity, having to do with the suspected presence of the eye of God in the tops of trees and in the mysterious depths of trout pools... On both sides: strong fiber, ample courage, a constant uneasy dialogue with ancient values, and outcroppings, all along the way, of excess...
...talking about deliberate cruelty, even in its more subtle forms. What I am talking about, of course, is excess. I get the impression that some people have spent so much time in the trenches of verbal warfare that they have lost sight of the enemy...
...done in the Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet Nam Memorial is, in a sense, the most purely true thing that can be said about the American war in Viet Nam. It has the tragic grace of the incontestably lost and therefore the incontestably...