Word: specimen
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Julian Moynahan, who lives near Princeton and teaches English at Rutgers, knows his ground. Out of such unpromising material as New Jersey zoning laws and state statutes, he has fashioned a whimsical specimen of an up-and-coming subgenre: the eco-novel. The wealthy residents-Howard's ex-neighbors-want nothing to despoil the green splendor of their homes and three-acre lots. Less favored citizens want Watchung-because it will help to pay property taxes...
...dictée, as every French schoolchild learns to his sorrow, is a dictation exercise full of traps for the unwary. Prosper Mérimée, author of the original Carmen, once offered a 248-word specimen as a test at the imperial court in Compiègne, and Napoleon III committed 75 errors. (Empress Eugènie made only 62.) Nothing much has changed since then in the stern regulations governing how the French teach their language to their children. Grading is fierce (more than five mistakes on a dictée bring a zero...
...follows, then, that science is valuable to the reader only as myth, as a metaphor which mirrors the relations drawn in literature between our own experience and its intelligible representation. That Sir Thomas Browne is now studied in universities as a specimen of English 17th century prose doesn't concern the reader, who turns to Pseudodoxia Epidemica in the same spirit that he turns to Wittgenstein or Levi-Strauss: to collect what could be called "taxonomies of natural phenomena." Nostalgia, the sad evocation of our universal angst, episodes which recall a decisive moment in our lives, ontological dread before...
...understand how [the case] could have been prepared in this manner." Then Prosecutor Williams claimed he no longer had reasonable doubt, partly because he had just found that he really did have tire tracks that matched Corona's truck after all; the correct tire-track specimen had simply been mislaid. "I am almost incredulous," exploded Patton...
...meter freestyle by 1/100 sec. over Australia's Brad Cooper. Only minutes before he was to swim in the finals of the 1,500-meter freestyle, DeMont was told that he had been disqualified; an illegal stimulant, ephedrine, had been found in his urine specimen, submitted after the 400. The ephedrine was in prescribed medication that DeMont, an asthmatic, had been taking for years and that he had noted on his Olympic medical form. But neither the Olympic medical committee nor the U.S. coaching staff had warned Rick to discontinue the treatment during the Games (although a U.S. team...