Word: mimic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Humans didn't even invent effective action-at-a-distance weapons until a mere 40,000 or so years ago. Only with these new tools, like the bow and arrow and the spear thrower, could our ancestors begin to mimic the speed and sharpness of a big cat's claws. Even so, predator animals remained a major threat. As late as the 7th century B.C., a stela erected by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal recounts the ferocity of the lions and tigers after torrential rains had flushed them out of their lairs; the great King, of course, stamped out the beasts...
...finding of the altered gene, which codes for an enzyme necessary for mopping up dangerous free radicals roaming in the central nervous system, suggests that scientists may find a cure for the disease if they can mimic the effects of the enzyme in sufferers of familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Familial ALS affects 5 to 10 percent of Gehrig's Disease sufferers...
...charge that without safeguards and consultations and thorough psychiatric evaluations, patients may seek out suicide not because of their disease, but because of their despair. Recognizing depression in dying patients is hard, since the culture ties the two together. Its symptoms of fatigue, loss of appetite, aches and pains mimic those of advanced cancer. "What Kevorkian's doing is killing people because they're depressed," says James Bopp Jr., an Indiana attorney who is president of the National Legal Center for the Medically Dependent and Disabled. "But depression is curable. He takes absolutely no account of this...
These days, however, it is Wynn's personality that is on trial. Many people know Wynn as a witty storyteller who can mimic anyone's accent and who rewards his employees with gifts (he once bought luxury cars for 377 casino supervisors in Atlantic City). But a lawsuit by the former head of Wynn's Golden Nugget casino in Las Vegas, Dennis Gomes, has laid out what colleagues and even some relatives of Wynn's have said about him privately for years: he has a tendency to explode at the people around him. There are many offenses Gomes lists...
Giorgione appeals more to modern taste because his imagery was more mysterious and poetic, and the idea that painting should mimic the effects of lyric or pastoral poetry, ut pictura poesis, was a favorite 16th century dictum. There is a word for it, Giorgionesque, an allusive quality that comes through even in conventional subjects, such as the exquisite portrait of a young knight surrounded by the gleaming black weapons of his vocation, a dense still life with religious overtones (the handle and pommel of the sword are also a cross), the bony silence of the knight's face contrasting with...