Word: motes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...stand hooded figures, some with long forked staffs bearing stag horns and hawk feathers, animal skins and other talismans. "Circle of power," she chants, "I conjure thee to ban such things as named by me...Attract such things as named by me...Be cleansed of all impurity...So mote it be." Surrounded by swarms of mosquitoes, the others chant back in litany, "So mote...
...Rudenstine talks about the importance of diversity, Harvard's faculty recently pointed out the mote in Rudenstine's own eye. Without his house in order, some question how much force Rudenstine's words to the nation can carry...
Since antiquity, philosophers have argued that higher mental abilities -- in short, thinking and language -- are the great divide separating humans from other species. The lesser creatures, Rene Descartes contended in 1637, are little more than automatons, sleepwalking through life without a mote of self- awareness. The French thinker found it inconceivable that an animal might have the ability to "use words or signs, putting them together as we do." Charles Darwin delivered an unsettling blow to this doctrine a century ago when he asserted that humans were linked by common ancestry to the rest of the animal kingdom. Darwinism raised...
...with Gomes' sexual preference have every right to their beliefs. But they have no right to tell me what mine or Gomes' should be. Or to judge. I seem to remember the Bible saying something about taking the log out of your own eye before trying to remove the mote in somebody else...