Word: germ
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...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...
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...
...November 1990, it had begun filling 191 bombs and Scud missile warheads with deadly biological agents such as anthrax and botulinum toxin. The bombs would have been mounted on missiles, planes or drone aircraft and dropped on enemy troops, fewer than half of whom had received the appropriate germ-warfare vaccinations. Twenty-five Scuds outfitted with biological weapons were aimed at cities in Saudi Arabia and Israel...
...sent him veiled threats indicating the U.S. and Israel would retaliate with nuclear arms if he did. Deploying the weapons effectively would in any case have been difficult. Still, Administration experts say they were capable of causing thousands of casualties. "It would have been awful," says Matthew Meselson, a germ-warfare expert at Harvard University. For example, botulinum toxin kills by interfering with the nervous system and ultimately paralyzing the respiratory muscles. The Pentagon estimated that just one Scud missile warhead filled with the toxin could contaminate...