Word: featly
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...studying when we measure the spread of a word like memetic, docudrama or studmuffin over the Internet. Crazes among schoolchildren provide particularly tidy examples. When I was about nine, my father taught me to fold a square of paper to make an origami Chinese junk. It was a remarkable feat of artificial embryology, passing through a distinctive series of intermediate stages: catamaran with two hulls, cupboard with doors, picture in a frame--and finally the junk itself, fully seaworthy or at least bathworthy, complete with deep hold and two flat decks, each surmounted by a large square-rigged sail...
...That feat was even more gutsy because she had separated her shoulder and torn shoulder muscles after crashing into the boards with 30 seconds left in the second period. She was unable to take faceoffs afterward. Mleczko had taken 43 draws in the first two periods and won 29 of them...
...blaze of publicity, it was a monstrous 30-ton machine, as big as two semis and filled with enough vacuum tubes (19,000), switches (6,000) and blinking lights to require an army of attendants. Capable of adding 5,000 numbers in a second, a then unheard of feat, it could compute the trajectory of an artillery shell well before it landed (compared with days of labored hand calculations...
...astonishing feat brought instant celebrity to Steptoe and his partner, Robert Edwards--as well as a barrage of criticism. The Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups denounced it as playing God, and even scientists like James Watson, unraveler of DNA, were worried about tinkering with a process as sacrosanct as procreation. But the debate faded as it became clear that the brave new world of babymaking that Steptoe had ushered in was providing a desperately sought service...
...from Kitty Hawk and flew 120 ft.--little more than half the wingspan of a Boeing 747-400. That 12-sec. flight changed the world, lifting it to new heights of freedom and giving mankind access to places it had never before dreamed of reaching. Although the Wright brothers' feat was to transform life in the 20th century, the next day only four newspapers in the U.S. carried news of their achievement--news that was widely dismissed as exaggerated...