Word: genuses
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...raised sooner than one might expect. Since mescaline became available, several other drugs with similar properties have been isolated, and some of these have very many of the qualities of Huxley's soma. The most astounding one is psilocybin, a compound isolated quite recently from a certain genus of Mexican mushrooms and now also synthesized. Psilocybin affects the mind much more selectively than mescaline, specifially stimulating those psychic effects that have been termed "broadened consciousness." It never impairs the higher mental functions, often it greatly enhances them. Visions and physical symptoms do occur but seem less intense than with mescaline...
...never bothering to define empiricism, he may write indefinitely on the issue virtually without contradiction. Of course, some people are naturally conservative; they prefer to avoid taking a position whenever possible. They just don't believe in going out on a limb, when they dont even know the genus of the tree. For these people, the vague generality may be junked and replaced by the artful equivocation, or the art of talking around the point...
Nonetheless, from A to zyzzogeton (a genus of South American leaf hoppers), Merriam-Webster's Third Edition is lighter and brighter than its immediate predecessor. It weighs 13½ v. 16½ Ibs., has 2,662 v. 3,194 pages, contains 450,000 v. 600,000 entries. Gone are the gazetteer, the biographical dictionary, and 100,000 obsolete or nonlexical terms, such as the names of characters in Dickens. In are 100,000 brand-new terms, from astronaut, beatnik, boo-boo, countdown, den mother and drip-dry, to footsie, hard sell, mccarthyism, no-show, schlemiel, sit-in, wage dividend...
When the pratfall and pie-in-the-puss comedy tires him, Comic Wisdom resorts to a genus of comedy that in seven films (all hits) and numberless TV shows he has failed to master: pantomime. While allowing himself to be duped by a charlatan of a music-hall star (played to seedy perfection by Jerry Desmonde), he lisps, giggles, gawks, grimaces, mugs and burbles. "Aggressive," is his psychiatrist's diagnosis at film's end. "I think you'd better grow up a little...
...using a hypothetical situation, we can define the various categories of the genus fan, Suppose the Harvard quarterback completes a wobbly pass to his left end for a four-yard gain against Penn. It must be emphasized that this is a hypothetical situation...