Word: proto
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...managing astronomical sums of other people's money or just deciding what to pack for London. It might seem another problem altogether to spend your time reconstructing that fateful period 3.5 billion years ago, when protein molecules dancing through the earth's primordial foam collectively spit forth the first proto-bacteria, life's earliest ancestors. You know the rest...
...Linguists have their own ideas about how change occurs; they have managed through a rough philological equivalent of genetic research to work back from modern languages to common roots, thus reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, a purely theoretical tongue. But as Renfrew points out, if the difficulties of dating genetic change are vexing, the ones for dating linguistic change are even harder: though linguists can chart the rate of change from, say, late Latin to early Spanish, they can't prove the same rate applies for other languages before the advent of writing...
...leave her stultifying school and strike out on her own. She writes up a newspaper ad seeking employment, trudges miles to town in the rain to deliver it, then treks back a week later to pick up the one and only reply. It's a quietly stirring proto-feminist sequence, but here it is transmuted into the banal musical yearnings of a romantic teenage girl: "Over mountains, over oceans/Heaven take me away/For I long for my liberty/For sweet liberty I pray...
...there was always Schulz. "Peanuts" was his life, and we followed its arc in the lines he drew for the strip: Tentative at first, in "Li'l Folks," the proto-"Peanuts" comic started for the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1947; bold, strong and in control it its 1960s heyday (even Linus lookedsecure); ragged in its final years. Somehow, even though we all knew what to expect - and what an ultimate betrayal that would have been, for Lucy to actually let Charlie Brown kick that football - we were always interested in the whole neurotic gang, and now that Charles Schulz...
...Beach Boys, seemingly mere proto-Fonzes, have in fact done as much for America's sound as Elvis, as long as you listen around. The cool kids in middle school have their Backstreet Boys, the keen kids at Harvard have their Belle and Sebastian. And everyone has the Beach Boys...