Word: germ
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...swear that a germ of veritas doesn't lurk in Goldhagen's screed. Let truth and falsehood grapple, said Milton--let former student and present professor debate at some forum in Cambridge what Jews did or didn't do after the Holocaust...
...Characters as disparate as Howard Hughes, Lady Macbeth and Freud's sexually conflicted "Rat Man" are among its victims. Today, in every elementary school of 200 pupils or so, three or four youngsters are likely to suffer from it. Howard Hughes' symptoms included an insistence on having a germ-free environment and all his windows permanently sealed. The schoolchildren are more inclined to count cracks in the blacktop (for them, "Step on a crack, break your mother's back" is frighteningly literal) or meticulously arrange their crayons in neat rows, again and again, to avert some imagined catastrophe...
...Prevention in Atlanta. In a matter of days, highly trained specialists--essentially a public-health swat team from the premier U.S. government lab's Epidemic Intelligence Service--were on the scene. Within two weeks, their meticulous detective work had identified the deadly microbe: a lethal variant of a germ known as hantavirus, carried by rodents but never known to be deadly in humans. Armed with that knowledge, health officials launched a multistate public-awareness campaign, and before long the number of deaths plummeted--from 20 in the first few months to just 23 since...
Even his language is solitary: Dole gets ribbed for his speaking style, the guttural growls, the verbal wheat germ ("anti-dumping; level the playing field; Super Three; may not mean a lot to you, but it's important"), the unpopulated syntax ("Have to look into that. See what happens in committee. Gotta go"). Dole speaks a language all his own. It's Indo-Midwestern, rooted in a place where there's no extra credit for extra words, where humor is often truth's only reliable vehicle. Dole's vernacular of nods, grunts, snickers and shrugs can be as baffling...
...democracy of Taiwan is special. It is a germ of democracy that will fool China's immune system if China insists on taking us on. David will once again win the battle over Goliath. MING-JING HWANG Taipei Via E-mail...