Word: inept
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Russ Meyer's bosomacious melodramas are taught in colleges. Oscar Micheaux's primeval black parables play in museums. And Ed Wood, who couldn't get arrested when he was alive--all right, as an alcoholic transvestite, he could get arrested, but nobody in Hollywood paid attention to his goofily inept sci-fi and sex films--was in 1994 the honored subject of Tim Burton's major motion picture...
Girls who suffer from the rare genetic disorder known as Turner's syndrome are a little shorter than average, have a thicker neck and usually can't have children. Otherwise, there's nothing especially striking about them--except that often they're socially inept. They butt into conversations. They misread facial expressions, tones of voice, body language. They're insensitive to others' feelings...
...study, a team led by research psychiatrist David Skuse of the Institute of Child Health in London ran those tests on 80 Turner's girls and then evaluated their social skills. It turned out that the ones with Mom's X were far more inept than those with a paternal chromosome...
...more likely, a cluster of genes--on the X chromosome that governs social skills, and if those genes are activated only when they're passed on by the father. This phenomenon, called genetic imprinting, is known to occur in humans. Thus, says Skuse, boys are genetically destined to be inept because they get their X chromosome from Mom. Girls, by contrast, are socially adroit because they get one X from Dad (not that it did him any good, since he got it from...
Thus begins a chaste affair of the feet. Sugiyama takes ballroom classes at which he is pathetically inept, and it is ages before his dream girl agrees to help him (in a lovely montage scored to the Drifters' Save the Last Dance for Me). As he practices his steps--at his desk, in the subway, under a bridge in the mild rain --the zombie is revived. "Every day I feel so alive," he says. "Even being tired feels great." His rejuvenation lasts one act too many, but it has a satisfying payoff, to the tune of guess-which Rodgers...