Word: homo
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This point does not seem to need belaboring, yet the eight novels that Golding wrote after Lord of the Flies relentlessly do so, in frequently venturesome ways. Neanderthals are exterminated by a rapacious new breed of creatures called Homo sapiens (The Inheritors); a shipwrecked survivor clings to a rock in the Atlantic Ocean, wondering (along with the reader) whether he is alive or dead and recalling his wickedness on dry land (Pincher Martin); a towering religious structure is erected on a foundation of slime (The Spire...
...WOMEN HUMAN?, Dorothy L. Sayers notes that Latin, which helped shape Western thought, provided two words for "man"--homo, meaning person or being, and vir. referring to the sexual side. For women there was only one word, femina. It carried the second, sexual sense; no way existed for referring to a woman merely as a person. French has preserved but varied the gap; the only formal words for female people are those which also mean "daughter" or "wife," In English, as it happens, we lack such an immediate, glaring linguistic wrong. But that happenstance merely makes the gap more difficult...
Tourists visiting the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Florida sometimes discover not only Alligator mississippiensis in the swim. A Homo sapiens named Kent Vliet, 26, may have waded in too. With a cypress pole in hand, the University of Florida doctoral candidate in zoology usually takes the plunge in the late afternoons during the mating season. "In the morning they're a little crotchety and don't want to be bothered," he says...
...dawn of human history, and Homo sapiens steps out from his cave to watch the rising sun paint the horizon. Suddenly he hears a rustling in the forest. His muscles tense, his heart pounds, his breath comes rapidly as he locks eyes with a saber-toothed tiger. Should he fight or run for his life? He reaches down, picks up a sharp rock and hurls it. The animal snarls but disappears into the trees. The man feels his body go limp, his breathing ease. He returns to his darkened den to rest...
...start of another working day, and Homo sapiens steps out of his apartment building into the roar of rush hour. He picks his way through the traffic and arrives at the corner just in time to watch his bus pull away. Late for work, he opens his office door and finds the boss pacing inside. His report was due an hour ago, he is told; the client is furious. If he values his job, he had better have a good explanation. And, by the way, he can forget about taking a vacation this summer. The man eyes a paperweight...