Word: extinct
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Full moonlight drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon's capital -shallow, cratered, extinct. It was late, but not yet midnight; now the buses had stopped the polished roads and streets in this region sent for minutes together a ghostly unbroken reflection up. The soaring new flats and the crouching old shops and houses looked equally brittle under the moon, which blazed in windows that looked its way. The futility of the black-out became laughable: from the sky, presumably, you could...
...WITH THIS attack, we can begin to guess what McCarthy pines for. She wants a novel that addresses moral issues, that takes a political position, that is didactic and "serious." Are such novels extinct as McCarthy implies? Moral novels that take ideas seriously are, to the contrary, very strong, in Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter, for example. Political novels still concern contemporary writers, especially feminists such as in Mary Gordon's Final Payments. McCarthy's arguments are not only vague but inaccurate...
...more than 12,000 gorillas still roam freely in their native Central Africa, and many experts feel that wild gorillas could be all but extinct by the year 2000. That leaves only zoos, primate centers and wildlife preserves as repositories of these greatest of all apes. Yet the 600 or so gorillas in captivity have been extremely poor breeders. Only about 100 animals have been born in North America in the past decade, hardly enough to ensure survival of the species...
...when your teacher loaded you and your classmates on a schoolbus for a field trip to the Museum of Natural History. You all gathered around some billion-year-old fossil or stood dwarfed beneath a terrifying representation of a brontosaurus, or marvelled at a taxidermist's conception of an extinct dodo bird perched in an artist's conception of its natural habitat while your teacher recited something about the Jurassic Period. And you trotted from exhibit to exhibit, awed and thrilled by them...
...Fourth of July speech today is seldom the shapely purple cloud of bombast that it once was. That style is nearly extinct. The old eagle-screaming rhapsody, the Everlasting Yea, survives mostly in wistful, or merely empty, references to Jefferson, in Smithsonian pageants or in the elegiac drone of a speaker recalling something that happened a long, long time ago, almost in another country...