Word: locust
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Though he was born in Brooklyn, the city of Perelman's childhood and youth was Providence. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. At Brown University one of his best friends was Nathanael West, the future author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, and a future brother...
Even long after 1955, when Cole Porter wrote those lyrics, the word millionaire evoked images of power and plenty, of sprawling estates, Palm Beach tans, Locust Valley lockjaw accents and exclusivity. But millionaires, like almost everything else, are not what they used to be. A study released last week by U.S. Trust, an old-line Manhattan firm that specializes in handling O.P.M. (other people's money), reports that the nation's millionaire population, helped along by inflation, has in the past decade been growing at an average annual rate of 14%. Today, the company calculates, precisely...
They are periodical cicadas (pronounced sih-Kay-duhs), the world's longest-lived insects. Despite a locust-like appearance, they neither bite nor sting nor devastate vegetation. Entomologists currently count 19 separate "broods," which appear at various times in different parts of the country, some once every 13 years. But all follow roughly the same miraculous life cycle. Growing through five skin-shedding molts and sucking nourishing juices from roots, they emerge with uncanny precision, triggered by some still mysterious internal clock...
...outsiders, there does not seem to be much in Chad worth fighting about. Carved out of former French Equatorial Africa, it is impoverished, plagued by drought, malaria and periodic locust swarms. Its only known resource is a uranium deposit far in the north. Perhaps it is Chad's poverty (annual per capita income: $120) that makes its religious and ethnic rivalries so fierce. With so little to go around, each side must fight all the harder to obtain a life-sustaining share...
...elements to fight. Walt Whitman ended his poem Facing West from California 's Shores: "But where is what I started for so long ago?/ And why is it yet unfound?" Nathanael West's classic portrayal of California madness, the mob scene in The Day of the Locust, shows the rage of those who fled the ordinariness of their lives. "Where else could they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges?" he wrote. "Once there, they discovered that sunshine isn't enough...