Word: skillfulness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...station wagons and huge recreational vehicles for a couple of days of shopping for items that range from electrified fences and worm medicine to a $200 "rocking sheep" covered in natural fleece. Wolfing down golf-ball-size chunks of fresh lamb barbecue (at $3.50 a plate), they watch as skilled artisans turn piles of fleece into yarn with Rumpelstiltskin-like skill. After hours spent looking over the thickset Dorsets and Suffolks, fine-haired Merinos, goatish Barbado black bellies and exotic Karakuls on display, people whose only past experience with sheep also involved mint jelly begin to make knowing comments about...
Kite flying is no childish pastime. It demands skill, ingenuity and an attention span rarely possessed by the young. Some of the great kite innovators, after all, have included such mature fellows as Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, the Wright brothers and Alexander Graham Bell, whose tetrahedral model once lifted a man 168 ft. According to Wyatt Brummitt, author of a 1971 book called?what else? ?Kites, it helps a kiter to be "slightly nutty." Brummitt, 81, adds that enthusiasts must also have "a little imagination and a little sense of serenity to enjoy the sense of extension...
...takes the jobless off the streets but does not prepare them for permanent employment. Says Bernard Anderson, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School: "Most of the money has been spent on Job Corps-type programs of scraping graffiti off telephone poles rather than skill-training for specific jobs...
...back to the 18th century, when the head of the tiny emirate of Dariyah (near Riyadh), Mohammed ibn Saud, formed an alliance with Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, the fiery leader of a puritanical Islamic movement; his Wahhabi sect still holds sway in Saudi Arabia. This combination of tribal military skill and religious fanaticism did dominate central Arabia for 75 years, until it was crushed by an invading Egyptian army acting at the behest of the Ottoman rulers in Constantinople...
...major to them. But her accretion of small details softens the hard edges of Beckett's known past and published works. Born into a prosperous Irish Protestant family in 1906, Beckett was a crashingly normal, if sometimes diffident lad up through his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin. His skill with languages brought him a two-year fellowship in Paris and the promise of a teaching post at Trinity when he finished. In Paris, Beckett joined the circle of acolytes surrounding James Joyce; the young Irishman's first published work was an essay championing his senior countryman. Joyce...