Word: grail
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last month Leaver announced that Boitano would not try the jump for which he is best known, the quadruple toe loop, at the Olympics. Never performed successfully in competition, the quad has become the slippery grail of skating. Boitano practices it daily and hits almost 100% of the time. But in competition, he has thrown it -- and blown it -- four times, most noticeably at the 1987 world championship. Leaver sees little point in risking another disaster when Boitano already has what is considered the most technically difficult program ever and can score 6.0s without the quad. Boitano finds...
Meanwhile, Hawking is pursuing a more earthly reward, seeking what Cambridge Astronomer Martin Rees calls the physicists' Holy Grail: a theory that will combine general relativity with the quantum theory. This requires "quantizing" gravity, the only one of nature's four basic forces that cannot yet be explained by the quantum theory...
...billed as the high-tech investment strategy of the decade. Using computerized trading in esoteric investment vehicles like stock-index futures, the technique promised managers of pension funds or any other kind of investment pool the Wall Street equivalent of the Holy Grail: "insurance" for their portfolios against future downturns in the stock market. As the Dow Jones industrial average kept climbing to new highs through much of 1987, the value of the funds covered by so-called portfolio insurance swelled to an estimated $80 billion...
When Skipper Dennis Conner brought home that yachtsman's grail, the America's Cup, from Australia in February, his backers in the San Diego-based Sail America syndicate seemed to have landed a cargo of gold. The cachet of a home- waters defense in 1991 figured to pump $1.2 billion into San Diego...
...first two boxes we found Gershwin's Pardon My English, which was presumed lost, and Cole Porter's Gay Divorce. Later I opened an envelope with Porter's name on it and found songs by him I didn't even know had existed." Further burrowing yielded the Holy Grail of show-tune scholarship: more than 175 unpublished Kern songs. "In sheer numbers and quality it's extraordinary," says H. Wiley Hitchcock, a Brooklyn College musicologist. "It's like finding Leonardo's original sketchbooks...