Word: phrasings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Here at the annual SIGGRAPH computer-graphics show in Dallas, I'm having my first hands-on encounter with the technological phenomenon known variously as cyberspace, artificial reality or, in a phrase borrowed from computerese, virtual reality. It relies on the techniques of interactive computer graphics to create the illusion of navigating through exotic locations that seem as "real" as those of the real world. The scene I'm exploring was created by the University of Washington's human-interface-technology lab to run on hardware made by VPL Research, a tiny firm in Redwood City, Calif., that...
...even pampered another, potentially greater source of trouble in the same region. The American obsession with Cuba as the Soviet cat's-paw in the Western Hemisphere was one factor that led Washington to support Panama's Manuel Noriega. As an anticommunist, Noriega qualified, in Franklin Roosevelt's famous phrase, as "our son of a bitch." Not until the cold war faded and the war on drugs escalated did Noriega earn his place on the CIA's dart boards and a one-way trip to Miami, where he now sits in jail...
When this seemingly innocuous phrase appeared in Wilson's 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, it set off alarm bells as surely as ant pheromones trigger the defense mechanisms of a threatened colony. Critics scrambled out of the corners of the academy to attack Wilson's ideas as dangerously deterministic. To suggest, as he did, that human actions were more hard-wired than generally believed threatened to upset the balance of nurture so carefully guarded by those who held that environment, not heredity, shaped behavior...
...cosmic assumptions of his own; seeing them in your blue book, he can only applaud your uncommon perception. For example, while most graders are politically unconcerned, not all are agnostic. This is an older generation, recall. Some may be tired of seeing St. Augustine flattened by a phrase or a phrase or reading about the "Xian myth...
After the Vietnam defeat, Southerners are no longer the only Americans who understand, in Arnold Toynbee's phrase, that history is not something that happens only to other people. Wrestling unsuccessfully with guilt and defeat is no longer a Southern monopoly...