Word: extinct
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...young hack scripter (William Holden), broke, desperate, and pursued by his creditors, ducks his car up a Sunset Boulevard driveway and blunders into an eerie survival of an extinct world. In the moldering, overgrown grounds he finds a mausoleum-like Hollywood mansion, circa 1921, intact to the last monstrous detail. It is inhabited by two living relics: Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), a great star of the silent movies, still wealthy, with an arrogant grandeur once rooted in fame and now propped by delusion; Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim), once a great director (which Von Stroheim was), now her devoted...
...throne, Henri has spent most of his 41 years hovering in expectant exile just outside the boundaries of France. In 1931 he married Isabelle d'Orleéans-Bragance, the doe-eyed, lovely daughter of a pretender to the throne of Brazil. Fearing that the line might become extinct, Henri's father viewed this further inbreeding of the Orleans clan with some alarm; but in the next 16 years Henri...
...everyone is simply fascinated by the idea of 'the bigger the better.' There are some examples in the history of the world that should lead us to question this view. We should not forget the dinosaur . . . Indeed, we should not forget the battleship, now almost extinct...
...little red schoolhouse may be on the way out, but it is still far from extinct. Last week the U.S. Office of Education gave out the facts & figures. Though one-room schools have been folding up at the rate of twelve a day for 30 years, there are still 75,000 left. They account for nearly one-half of all U.S. public-school buildings, employ one-twelfth of U.S. teachers, have an enrollment of one-sixteenth (1,500,000) of U.S. schoolchildren...
Perhaps the deepest change is the disappearance of the economically self-sufficient individual. In pretechnical times most people were cultivators who lived very largely (and usually poorly) on what they produced at home. Throughout the 19th Century, this type lost ground steadily. Now in advanced countries it is almost extinct. The U.S. farmer who raises cash crops with the help of complex machines is as specialized as an airplane pilot and as dependent on others. This ever-tightening cooperation is unprecedented among mammals. The nearest biological analogies are the colonial ants and termites...