Word: protean
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Certain it is that no definite stock-taking can be made of protean Pablo Picasso before he is safely dead. Until then he will spend his life as he has spent it to date: in sporadically escaping from himself by declaring war on his latest period and once more attempting to foretell the shape of things to come. Like the Proteus of classic fable, he has the further gift of eluding those who clutch at him, changing his shape and slipping out of their grasp. At 58, he is still the revolutionary...
...statesman should be known by one or two features, not for a variety. Monocle and orchid were priceless assets to Joseph Chamberlain. Everyone thought of Gladstone in terms of collars. . . . Anthony Eden's adoption of the Foreign Office hat secured him. . . . But Churchill! What protean changes his hats represent, embracing official and naval cocked hats, army pillbox, hussars' busby, service cap, steel helmet, sombrero, Oxford degree hat, artists' berets and paper party hats...
...physical difficulties. "Man," says the author of Up From the Ape, "is a made-over animal. . . . His ancestors have functioned as arboreal pronogrades [moving on all fours] and brachiators, or arm-progressing tree-dwellers-not to mention more remote stages involving other changes of habitat, posture and locomotion. This protean history has necessitated repeated patching and reconstruction of a more or less pliable and long-suffering organism. The bony framework has been warped and cramped and stretched in one part or another, in accordance with variations in the stresses and strains put upon it by different postures and by changes...
...surgery Dr. Matas has been protean. He was one of the first to use local anesthesia. He invented a splint for broken jaws and aluminum binders for bulging arteries. He discovered safe ways of operating in the cavities of the chest and sure ways of testing for blocked circulation in fingers and toes...
...anthropologist's interest in items human is protean. Neatly arranged cases, cupboards and drawers at the Smithsonian Institution contain 1.500 human skeletal remains which Dr. Hrdlicka has collected. In filing cabinets are his records of American whites and Negroes, of Egyptians and Slavs (he is a Bohemian), of peoples in Peru, Mexico, Asia, of little understood midgets. A small cabinet, labeled tetrapodisis and still only meagrely filled, contains the case histories of children who ambled, like little animals, on hands and feet before they walked upright (TIME, Jan. 6 & Jan. 27, 1930). The "walking-on-all-fours" records form...