Word: odd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...underlying the creative commotion during the Cambrian are laws that we have only dimly glimpsed - laws that govern not just biological evolution but also the evolution of physical, chemical and technological systems. The fanciful animals that first appeared on nature's sketchpad remind Kauffman of early bicycles, with their odd-size wheels and strangely angled handlebars. "Soon after a major innovation," he writes, "discovery of profoundly different variations is easy. Later innovation is limited to modest improvements on increasingly optimized designs...
...classic complaint against abstract art is that it alienates the average viewer. An odd combination of right-wing representationalists, left-wing socialist realists and bewildered museum-goers have long criticized the minimalist and expressionist pieces that dominated the art scene within the U.S. in the mid-20th century...
...odd coupling, but a happy one. Tony Randall, 75, took Heather Harlan, 25, to be his wife in a civil ceremony performed in 17th century English by New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Harlan is an understudy in School for Scandal, Randall's latest Broadway vehicle, which opened last weekend. "He spoke of two people becoming one," said Randall. "I'm afraid I'm a sucker for that kind of thing." Randall's wife of 54 years, Florence, died of cancer...
...Louisiana, then a French possession, where their language and culture withered, evolving into a kind of folk curiosity. Quebeckers do not want to go the way of the Cajun. They do not want to end up as some colorful ethnic subculture known for its music or cooking or the odd linguistic twist. Quebeckers are driven by a terror of being crushed by an English-speaking continent of 300 million into a mere cultural curiosity. Hence their hunger for political independence...
...evoke such reactions in print. It also established the author's basic comic strategy: a beleaguered hero tries to behave inoffensively among people whose self-centered behavior drives him privately mad. This formula still sparkled in The Russian Girl (1994), in which a husband meditates on his wife's odd and affected accent: "After a time he had stopped noticing it at all more than a couple of times a day, and for years had given up speculating what speech-sounds she might make if, for example, he were to creep up behind her and fire a loaded revolver past...