Word: oracular
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Coveted though they may be, Nobel prizes can be mixed blessings to scientists. At every turn, the winners are beseiged with demands to make speeches, grant interviews and perform myriad chores that leave precious little time for research. Even worse, an awed public often takes their statements with almost oracular seriousness. So says Rosalyn Yalow, the 1977 Nobelist in medicine, who concludes that the most prized policy for a laureate may sometimes be silence...
...only priests and an occasional petitioner entered, is bare except for a stela representing the two brothers with Osiris and Isis. A concealed chamber behind it may have contained the embalmed bodies of the brothers or, as some suggest, may have been used by a hidden priest to make oracular pronouncements to impress the faithful. But few of them would ever have heard him. For unlike a Christian church, the Egyptian temple was not designed for worshipers to gather to pray. Rather, it was a house built for the god himself, for his comfort and protection from prying eyes when...
...network news divisions, and Election Night is it. To call or not to call is the question-first the states, then the presidential winner -and timing with accuracy is everything. It was precisely at 3:30 a.m. when NBC, taking a deep breath and one last look into the oracular recesses of its key precincts, declared that Jimmy Carter would capture an electoral college majority and be next President...
...sense of fiction, considered as a whole, as epic of creation, man's vision of his own life as a quest." Romance isn't necessarily just a love story. Sometimes it's an adventure story and some of its common conventions, according to Frye, include stories of miraculous birth, oracular prophecies, foster parents, capture by pirates, narrow escapes from death, recognition of the true identity of the hero and his eventual marriage with the heroine...
...mass audience, the old regionalist's pronouncements were oracular. He was, after all, a reformed modernist: up to 1918 he had painted "lifeless symbolist and cubist pictures," full of "my aesthetic drivelings and morbid self-concerns." He had studied in Paris, the Antichrist's lair. So he could be believed. The rhetoric never altered; he was too ancient a drummer for that. The circumstances of his career did, and violently. For a brief time, the decade ending in 1939, he-with John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood-bestrode and dominated the taste of America. His emergence, however...