Word: slimed
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Only a generation or so ago, anthropological theory rested on the comfortable and slightly condescending premise that the human mind evolved, over the millennia, in much the same way that man climbed physically up from the primordial slime. The stages in this intellectual growth were clearly identified: the Old Stone Age, the New Stone Age, the Copper, Bronze and Iron Ages. Savage cultures unaccountably stranded well along the path of progress were conveniently classified as civilization's simple-minded dropouts, lingering and isolated echoes from mankind's distant past...
...logically from the primeval invention of tools to conquest of nature and finally to detachment from organic habitat by means of ultra-machines. With support from a big-think bibliography of 370 sources, Mumford argues that making and using tools didn't signal man's rise from slime. Dreams, language, ritual-all first products of the mind-did. And because the mind is father to the hand, it can reverse the mechanized march to doom. How that might happen will have to wait until Mumford's sequel; this book ends in the 16th century with Kepler, Tycho...
Perhaps we should consider what Tennyson wrote in Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. "Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time./City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime...
...hundred yards, and finally rushing into the village to overrun the enemy's positions. Vietnamese troops, who seldom weigh much more than 100 Ibs., move with considerable ease through the mud and can keep going from sunup to dark. Heavier Americans find themselves sinking deep into the slime, and U.S. advisers usually go on several short missions before they can take a full day's punishment in the paddies...
...jewelers' shops on the Ponte Vecchio (built in 1345) and inundated the Piazza, della Signoria. Propelling logs and other debris, it piled autos into heaps of smashed steel and left a thick oil slick in its wake. Hundreds of rare manuscripts and books were destroyed in the slime. The water knocked out five panels of Ghiberti's "Doors of Paradise," the famed bronze reliefs on the doors of the Baptistery near the Duomo. It wrecked the priceless 13th century crucifix by Cimabue in the Museum of Santa Croce. In the basements and other galleries of the Uffizi...