Word: extinct
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...good old days, according to Glubb, wise rulers had the selfless help of the old order of imperialist, a breed now "extinct." "Often," writes Glubb, "the imperialist devoted his life to the amelioration of the conditions of the people committed to his charge. Under this constant care, public security was assured, roads were built, sanitation introduced, education inaugurated. But he committed one unpardonable offense-he was supercilious...
...does this tribe maintain its population? If this law has been in force for a few generations, it should be extinct...
...Eugenie (Lady with a Spear} Clark. Yet on closer inspection, the dugong is no pinup ,girl. Both male and female dugongs have sharp, coarse whiskers and give off what is delicately described as "a strong, distinct, aromatic dugong odor." Clams & Cucumbers. The dugong shows signs of becoming extinct. Hundreds were slaughtered in the 18705 after an Australian firm offered $9 a gallon for dugong oil; many more were killed and eaten in World War II, when-Japanese garrisons in the South Pacific convinced themselves that dugong meat tastes like prime ribs of beef. California's Eugenie was speared...
...Arabia Talbot found that the oryx a handsome black-and-white antelope is almost extinct because Arabs believe that to kill one is a great deed. In the old days of horses and spears, the feat was reasonably difficult, but today great motorcades of oil-rich princes of Araby chase the oryx across the desert with barbaric howls and the roar of powerful engines. One emir organized a 300-car hunt. Now the oryx has retreated into the Rub' al Khali (empty quarter) of Southern Arabia, where at most 100 survive. Talbot does not think they will survive...
...delight of the letters is that Santayana is always ready to stray off the course of his philosophic thought into detours of personalities and opinions. Some pithy detours: ¶"Germans as far as I know have no capacity for being bored. Else I think the race would have become extinct long ago through self-torture." ¶"The material world is a fiction; but every other world is a nightmare." ¶ "I think that art, etc., has a better soil in the ferocious 100% America than in the Intelligentsia of New York. It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theatres...