Word: progenitor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mother and son live in a pagoda beach house called the Savannah Cabana, a sales model bought from a failed real estate developer who threw in a shack for Theenie, the family maid. The boy's private name for his father is the Progenitor, an impersonal though not inappropriate designation. Simons' parents are divorced; on visits, the Progenitor tries to exchange his son's mullet pole for a baseball bat and tempt him with the upscale life. But every paternal gesture meets with failure or misunderstanding. His sex lecture about contraception, for example, leaves Simons with...
...progenitor of all this filmic frenzy is a boyishly easygoing New England native who sets to work each morning to the accompaniment of blaring rock music...
...meager dreams of Funk, and his fellow rats, might seen ludicrous, but they are not to be laughed at. Perhaps Funk is the progenitor of the next evolutionary stage of mankind--Home Mallus, a deevolved species whose horizons are no longer than the distance from Woolworth's to Orange Julius...
...stories, as Film Director George Lucas points out in his affectionate Appreciation, are "very cinematic. They...don't just move from panel to panel, but flow in sequences-sometimes several pages long." Fans of the Lucas-Steven Spielberg adventure lark Raiders of the Lost Ark will discover a progenitor in The Seven Cities of Cibola. Indeed, Barks' stories and Lucas' Star Wars sagas share not only a gentle satiric edge but a kind of giddy imagination that leads into territory that is, in all senses of the word, fabulous...
...great deal of intellectual effort is therefore spent these days-mostly by the computer scientists themselves-trying to reassure everybody that, as smart as a machine can get, it can never be as intelligent as its progenitor. In part, this effort is made in order to see that the wizened, noncomputer generation-which often regards the younger with the unbridled enthusiasm that the Chinese showed the Mongol hordes-feels that it has a safe and legitimate place in modernity. In part, the effort is made because the proposition is true: a computer cannot possess the full range of human intelligence...