Word: plumbings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Psychologists concoct some absurd situations to plumb the depths of chimp insight. For instance, one experiment has the apes observe two handlers deliver cups of juice. One accidentally spills juice on the floor; the other overturns the cup deliberately. When asked to choose a handler to deliver their next cup of juice, chimps prefer the clumsy person, suggesting that they are aware they are better off with a klutz than with a helper with evil intent. Again, in analogous experiments capuchin monkeys appear to be less shrewd. The animals will, pitiably, continue to put their trust in a human helper...
...fierce momentum. Pennington and particularly Dench perform with such conviction that one forgets there is anything preposterous about their characters. This time Shaffer does not stack the deck in his perennial intellect-ecstasy debate but leaves the outcome ambiguous. In a gory, disturbing finale, both Edward and Helen must plumb, in their ways, the terrible meaning of the Perseus legend: that the slayer of the Gorgon becomes the thing he or she destroys...
...Mount Vesuvius, volcanology has been one of the world's more dangerous fields of study. Over the past 11 years, sudden eruptions -- including major blasts in Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines -- have killed an estimated 26,000 people; since 1979 at least 12 scientists have perished while seeking to plumb the fiery mysteries...
...this broth of verbal poverty, us poor inarticulates will have no resources to plumb the mysterious chasms of life. On one level all emotion will be encapsulated in words with the expressive power of Kevin Costner's face. On another, jargon will be so empty as to erase all valuable insights. And behind the screen of such an impotent vocabulary, behind all those psychoanalytic terms and cultural verbs, the abyss of violence, hate and hunger in the world will still stretch. To which we will only respond with a live transmission from CNN, and a denial that we can describe...
MOTIVATIONALLY DISPOSSESSED: plumb lazy...