Word: renfrew
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...only one seeing that trend. In Philadelphia the Renfrew Center Foundation, which specializes in treating eating disorders, reported a 25% jump in patients older than 35 over the past two years; today those women account for nearly a quarter of its patients. At the Remuda Ranch in Wickenburg, Ariz., the percentage of patients 40 or older has nearly quadrupled, from 3% in 1990 to more than 11% last year...
...clinical terms, there are similarities. People with both disorders tend to organize their days around eating and allow food to loom too large in their lives. "People who are anorexic and people who are overweight often begin to get phobic about food," says Dr. William Davis, of the Renfrew Center in Philadelphia, which treats patients with eating disorders. Food for them is much more than a source of nourishment; it can become a substitute for self-esteem and a vehicle for exercising--or losing--control over the body...
...dominant theory was that the precursor of the Indo-European languages came to Europe on the tongues of warrior horsemen from the Pontic steppes of present-day Ukraine, and that the broad dispersal of those languages across the Continent was a tribute to their martial success. Then in 1987 Renfrew made a powerful case that it was the Neolithic farmers who brought the language with them from the Middle East, and that along with their barley and wheat they sowed the overwhelming dominance of their tongue throughout Europe. But as the genetic evidence now suggests, neither warriors nor farmers were...
...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...
...Renfrew sees evidence that linguists - like their colleagues in other disciplines when they look at prehistoric developments - are beginning to think outside the box and relate language to "tangible material processes" like floods, the spread of agriculture and demographic developments. Currently the prehistory of language is, as Renfrew puts it, "at the edge of knowability," but that could change in a matter of decades if the feverish pace of cross-fertilization of molecular anthropology and archaeology continues...