Word: peculiare
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...Moreover, Cohen argues, "wanton" destruction may be but a distorted image of a larger picture. "The values associated with juvenile vandalism and thought to be peculiar to delinquents, such as the search for excitement and kicks, the high regard for toughness and aggression, might reflect values running through the whole society...
...acknowledged masters of that kind of writing--such as Lincoln's fellow orator at Gettysburg, Edward Everett, or Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner--generally featured elevated diction, self-consciously artful expression and a certain moral unction. Lincoln's insistence on direct and forthright language, by contrast, seemed "odd" or "peculiar," as in this passage from a public letter he sent to Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, an antislavery paper: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union...
Lincoln's ambition was never simply for office or power, but rather to accomplish something worthy that would stand the test of time, that would allow his story to be told after he died. "Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition," he told the voters of Sangamon County when he announced his candidacy for the Illinois state legislature at the age of 23. "I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem." He acknowledged that he was "young and unknown to many," that...
...little disingenuous. Field made his name studying the work and the man. Better than most outsiders, he knows the sources of Nabokov's genius, his gifts for showmanship and parody, his eccentricities and vanities. To discover at this late date that his hero was not Mother Teresa seems peculiar. --By R.Z. Sheppard
Jean-Baptiste grows up unloved and unlovely but a genius of a peculiar sort. He can catalog the world around him by scents: "He had gathered tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specific smells and kept them so clearly, so randomly, at his disposal, that he could not only recall them when he smelled them again, but could also actually smell them simply upon recollection. And what was more, he even knew how by sheer imagination to arrange new combinations of them, to the point where he created odors that did not exist in the real world." This talent...