Word: plain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...carriers of a rare, undoubtedly contagious skin disease. Headwaiters isolated them at restaurants, husbands kept yards away in public and normally affable children (their own) withdrew in horror at the sight (once good and simple) and touch (once soft and silky) of mothers grown suddenly striped, checked or just plain scaly from the knee down. They were only wearing textured stockings, but months went by before even best friends dared come close enough to tell them. By then it was too late: the rage was on, the mottled leg clearly the only one fit to stand...
...against wearing sport jackets and instructed never to remove their suit coats, most of which are black, like the boss's. Wasserman has often told unwary young employees that their color-stripe ties are handsome enough but not suitable to wear to the office. MCA people should be plain-color is for actors...
Screwy people. Screwy fish. The steelhead trout is the oddball of the Salmo family. It starts out life as a plain old rainbow trout. But then, for some curious reason that nobody has ever figured out, it suddenly gets itchy fins and migrates from its fresh-water birthplace down the rivers and out to sea. Its color changes from a bluish hue to steely silver (hence its name), its quarter-sized spots shrink to freckles, and it grows enormous for a trout: an average steelhead weighs 8 Ibs. (v. 1½ Ibs. for a rainbow), and big ones...
...Since plain American speech suffices only to describe the real world, a new vocabulary must be coined annually at colleges, where all experience has a heightened tone and ordinary superlatives falter. Life calls for adjectives that mean better than best, viler than vile, cooler than cool. The contemptibly stupid, the awesomely brilliant and the inexpressibly attractive all demand labels more vivid than last year's. This winter's college slang is real unreal...
...look at the bulging buttocks of the squat female figurine and British Archaeologist James Mellaart recognized a Stone Age fertility symbol; the dig he was starting on a plain in southern Turkey promised to open a door onto the most ancient reaches of human civilization. Mellaart treated every crum bling bit of dirt as a hard-to-read book, and after three years of diligent scratching through the 32-acre mound called Qatal Hiiyiik, he is now piecing together the story of a city that flourished at least 3,000 years before the first Pharaoh ruled in Egypt...