Word: explaining
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most birding zealots are at a loss to explain this lavish expenditure of time and energy. "It's just something I have to do," says Richard Turner, a professor of fine arts at New York University, falling into the familiar language of helplessness that marks the committed birder. The backyard and occasional fanciers should consider themselves lucky, according to Pete Dunne of the New Jersey Audubon Society. "Those people are still in control of their lives," he says. "For the rest of us, birding controls us. We're addicts...
...regular fire from purists for turning an aesthetic pursuit into a macho, competitive struggle. But even superlisters have been known to speak of birds with awe and wonder. Explanations for the appeal of birding proliferate, says Joseph Kastner, author of A World of Watchers, because it is hard to explain what the beauty and freedom of birds can do to the human psyche. At the heart of birding, he writes, is the "astonished awareness that comes in some unguarded moment when the watcher is left oddly vulnerable to feelings that only nature can provoke...
...calling as a family friend offering compassionate advice? Or was the mayor of Atlanta bent on stopping an investigation? That apparently was what a federal grand jury in Atlanta wanted to know last week when it summoned Andrew Young to explain his March 25 telephone conversation with Alice Bond, the estranged wife of former Georgia State Senator Julian Bond. The call was placed six days after she told Atlanta police that her husband had been a regular user of cocaine and that she had once seen the mayor use coke...
...expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old." What railroad men and land speculators were to the 1870s, investment bankers and risk arbitragers are to the 1980s. Perhaps a , modern-day Thorstein Veblen could explain the eagerness with which moneymen like Boesky vied with one another in acquiring the luxurious trappings of a baronial life-style. But the insider-trading scandal, a grotesque perversion of the Reagan free-market ethos, was perhaps the inevitable consequence of the gospel of wealth run amuck...
...gulls may have some attraction for birders; to the Fisherman they amount to rats with wings. He rings in Ogden Nash for support: "Hark to the whimper of the sea-gull;/ He weeps because he's not an ea-gull./ Suppose you were, you silly sea-gull,/ Could you explain it to your she-gull...