Word: peculiar
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Such excess, suggests Serpell, leads to the still prevalent view that demonstrative affection for animals is peculiar, if not unnatural. In 16th century Europe, women who talked to animals ran the risk of being incinerated for witchcraft. Today the ardent pet enthusiast is suspected of being a closet misanthrope. Not necessarily. The author's reading of available data tends to a more positive interpretation: "a vague suggestion that some pet-owners, for reasons which are unclear, may have a greater desire for company and friendship and because of this use their pets to augment what they already derive from...
...accomplishments. Among the more remarkable of Alvin's 1,716 deep-sea missions: locating and helping to recover (from a depth of 2,850 ft.) an H- bomb that fell into the Mediterranean after a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker collided over Spain in 1966; discovering peculiar new life-forms, including tube worms 10 ft. long, while probing hot-water vents in the ocean floor 8,000 ft. below the surface of the Pacific...
Although never formulated explicitly in The Good Mother, this question haunts Narrator Anna Dunlap's recounting of her peculiar ordeal. Admitting that their marriage has sunk into irremediable tedium, she and her husband Brian, a lawyer in Boston, agree to an amicable divorce. Anna gets custody of Molly, 3, and child support from Brian, whose firm is transferring him to Washington. Settling with her daughter into a Cambridge apartment, Anna hopes to support herself by giving piano lessons and taking a part-time job running rats through mazes at a local university...
Professors are not the only ones noted for their peculiar sense of humor. During the school's annual Ditch Day, seniors secure their rooms with a variety of fiendishly clever locks and barriers, then leave campus and challenge the wimps (underclassmen) to get in. This year one room was guarded by a computer that had to be addressed in several languages before the door could be opened. "I guess it sounds like a strange way to have fun," says Ky-Anh Phan, 19, a sophomore from San Jose, "but building strange things is what this place is all about...
...plans a raid that gets them out--something that the U.S. military could not manage for the hostages at the U.S. embassy. Seeing that children in Texas are not being educated well enough, Perot organizes a movement to change the system. Even a character like Lyndon LaRouche, in his peculiar way, dramatizes the openness of the American political process, the way in which a man who believes that Henry Kissinger is an agent of the KGB can acquire fame, fortune and a measure of political influence...