Word: speak
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Humans! They do like their words. Studies--by scientists who stuck recording devices on them and then counted--suggest that they speak some 16,000 words a day. Vervet monkeys, prairie dogs and European starlings have rudimentary language systems, but for serious verbiage, you have to hand it to Homo sapiens...
...biological trivia. She scours the extremes of the earth for anomalous and specially adapted humans, like the Tierra del Fuegians, who (before they died out) wore no more than a loose animal skin even in sleet and snow, and the Yana Indians of California, whose men and women speak different dialects. She has an engaging passion for rankings, as if all earthly fauna were competitors in an endless evolutionary Olympics. Our sense of taste, for example, outperforms a pigeon's and a tiger's (it turns out that tigers can't taste sweetness--sorry, Tony) but is crushed in turn...
Created by Diablo Cody (Juno), Tara is funny, fascinating and frustrating. As in Cody's pregnancy comedy, too many characters speak the same pop-culturese, and each persona is a flat-out cliché. But family members' interaction with the alters is believable: you get a real sense that they're accustomed to Tara's condition, having developed different strategies for dealing with each alter. The problem is that the show is too determined to play up its oddity, down to having Tara change costume with every transformation, which actually detracts from Collette's amazing character shifts--she adopts...
BottleneckIf a friend wants too pricey a wine, Post says, "Speak up!" But don't be explicit with a client. Just point to a different bottle...
...drove al-Qaeda out of their communities (even if their relations with the Shi'ite-led Iraqi government remain tense). A similar movement has begun to emerge in Mogadishu, reflecting the moderate, tolerant Islam that has traditionally prevailed in Somalia. But Somalia hasn't had a government to speak of for 18 years. There are no institutions that can be revived to institutionalize the new pro-law, anti-extremist movement. And the ICU is remembered, during its brief reign, for bringing the first semblance of law and order Somalia had seen in a generation...