Word: seemly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have grown accustomed in recent years to seeing our leaders, our preachers, our financiers, all implicated in dirty and immoral acts. Yet now the shadows seem more and more to be clouding even the green fields of sport. Is nothing sacred? Sport, after all, was supposed to be the arena we could visit to get away from ugly realities, refresh our sense of grace and possibility, and enjoy the catharsis of a well-defined universe, presided over by umpires who distinguish fair from foul. This year, however, as the regenerative cycle of baseball's spring comes round again, there...
...accused him of being a dirty player. Nor has anyone shown that his indiscretions affected his performance as an All-Star: in reality, after his affair was brought to light last year, Boggs hit a remarkable .380 (as opposed to .310 before). Even the trespasses that Boggs did commit seem almost trifling at a time when five football players at the University of Oklahoma alone are variously charged with gang rape, dealing in cocaine and assault with a deadly weapon...
This eye-popping blurb -- about a dictionary, no less -- may seem a bit of a stretcher. But the Oxford English Dictionary is not just another reference book, an arcane preserve of scholars and authors, like Burgess, who use language to make their livings. Since its completion in 1928, exactly 71 years after it was proposed at a meeting of the Philological Society in London, the OED has stood as the ultimate authority on the tongue of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, not to mention the language of tradespeople and the slang of the streets. Relatively few speakers of English...
...short, the new dictionary, all 350 million characters of it, now exists as a data base, an electronic version stored in a massive computer memory. At first glance, this may seem unremarkable; the difference between a lot of ; words on the page and on some terminal screen appears to be chiefly one of weight. But that is not the whole story. Electronic information can be made available to interested readers in a manner not possible through print. The task of devising software that would ferret out new uses for the OED2 was assigned to the University of Waterloo in Ontario...
...seem to have a reasonable idea of what happened, and as of now, it seems as though the students were not treated properly...