Word: specimen
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...which is tantamount to "pouring oil into a motor with ruined cylinders." It is also unrealistic to expect them to be democratic. They are so far behind the West that it takes a strong man to pull them up. Such a leader is likely to be an "exceedingly unattractive specimen," obsessed with the idea of modernization and oblivious to the niceties of diplomacy. And since he has to take so many unpopular steps, he cannot take a chance at the polls, where he is almost certain to be defeated. Only when a degree of modernization has been achieved...
...Palo Alto specimen probably died nonviolently, then its body sank to the ocean floor. A few shark teeth were found among the bones, suggesting that sharks may have had a few bites of paradoxia's plentiful flesh before a storm or flood covered the body with sand. Then sediment from the sierras covered it deeply, and a mountain range pushed upward between its grave and the ocean. At last big-brained primates, which had not evolved during its lifetime, brought it into the sunlight while searching for the secrets of infinitesimal matter...
Society for the Defence of the Horse, who stumbles on the Scarperer's scheme while trying to prevent Irish horses from being butchered for French tables. Gangster or guard, barfly or bystander, every one is deftly pinned to the specimen board with as little as a sentence or two of dialogue...
With the memoirs out of the way, MacArthur resumed his quiet, circumscribed routine. At 84, he was still a fine, bayonet-straight specimen of a soldier. Then, early in March, doctors at Washington's Walter Reed Hospital operated on him and removed his gall bladder. He appeared to progress fairly well after that, but soon he began to fail. For four weeks he fought tenaciously to live. Doctors performed two more major operations. It seemed that no ordinary man could withstand such punishment, but incredibly, MacArthur clung to life. Then at last he let go, drifted into a coma...
...Some of you think you've come to a circus to watch a dancing bear," said the moderator cynically. Perhaps some had, but Malcolm X was no dancing bear, no exotic specimen of a Near-Eastern religion, no man to be clinically observed. Flanked by three docile bodyguards Malcolm baffled his Leverett House audience with an oddly-paced blend of demagoguery and rationality, haughtiness and humor, sham history and acute analysis, utopian policies and realpolitik...