Word: moths
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...commissioned warship, the Navy's oldest officer on active duty retired last week. In 1943 Grace Murray Hopper, then an associate professor of mathematics at Vassar College, joined the reserves, and while developing an early computer program, coined one of computerese's most useful terms when she found a moth in the machine. "From then on," she recalled, "whenever anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." After the war, told she was too old for active duty, she went to work on UNIVAC, the first large commercial computer, and created COBOL, the breakthrough computer...
like the Japanese beetle and the gypsy moth. They warned that re-engineered P. syringae might also cause trouble. For example, they said, the altered bacteria might multiply and spread, perhaps even change the climate by retarding the formation of ice crystals in the atmosphere. Lindow and Panopoulos undermined that argument by pointing out that naturally occurring frost-inhibiting bacteria show no such inclination...
Yellowed and moth-eaten letters in a chest apparently jettisoned into the sea from a cruise liner were recently recovered by an Icelandic toymaker. These letters have been united with a similar collection unearthed last spring by an Arabian goatherd, and the complete set is now in my posession. They prove beyond doubt that the Friends of Sisyphus Youth League, led by senior and presumed Trotskyoid Tom Careen, and the Conversative Club, led by senior and presumed Monarchoid Sy Kahane, have aims far different than these shallow impressions indicate...
...only hope that this is the reason Kilty allowed a ten-year-old child to play the role of Moth. Don Armado's precocious page. As Moth is a role comparable to Puck in A Midsummer's Night's Dream, it is not something one farms out to a tyro. Appearing in the same scene with a child is the trial death; an actor is either upstaged or dragged down. Though one hates to badmouth someone who doesn'v yet have a complete set of teeth, Jason Harvey is really bad. He decants iambic as if he had taken elocution...
...real thing. Boyd is fine as long as he stays in New York City. In the South his story tends to unravel, and the picaresque incidents verge on cartoons. There are, however, some sharp observations of Dixie speech ("Each gnat she cooked me a fan dinner") and fauna ("a moth the size of a wren"), and an impudent send-up of atrium-style hotels, a high-rise in Atlanta where the guests go from check- in to elevator via canoe...