Word: stampings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite a long career in local and state government, Schaefer has never developed a tolerance for red tape. During his temporary stewardship at the department of human resources last month, he encountered the kind of bureaucratic bottleneck that irks him. An office had run out of food-stamp forms. "I asked why," says the Governor, "especially since the forms came from an office not 20 feet away." A clerk told him they were "supposed to come through the system," at which Schaefer snapped, "Why don't you just walk over and get them?" She did. On a more sympathetic note...
FORENSIC SCIENCE. Amplified by PCR, the DNA in a single sperm cell can link a suspect to a rape victim. Theoretically, a single epithelial cell found in saliva can be traced back to the person who, say, licked a stamp on a letter bomb. In California's San Mateo County, charges against a man arrested and jailed for a brutal rape were dropped in 1988 after a PCR test showed he could not have been the attacker. A year later another man was arrested in another rape case. Not only did a DNA marker make him a suspect...
...Postal Service will soon be offering some priceless stamps. Literally. In June it began producing its latest line of Christmas stamps in the midst of a continuing rate war with its overseer, the Postal Rate Commission. The Postal Service is dissatisfied with the current 29 cents price of a first-class stamp, which the Rate Commission approved in January in defiance of a long-standing request for a 30 cents stamp. The extra penny would bring in $850 million a year for the Postal Service, which is as hard hit by the recession as any business. The Postal Service...
Inevitably, fads fade, but while the mitt is still a hit, Mark Paliafito's company is lining up commercial sponsors who will stamp their logos on the Super Grip Ball. He also plans to make disks 7 ft. in diameter for team play. By next year, five new versions are expected to be on the market. And that should be welcome news even for beachgoers who do not play: the muted sounds from Velcro mitts will be displacing the annoying thwock-thwock-thwock of old- style beach paddle-ball games...
...added essay, Avoiding Sexist Language, offers some useful gender-neutral suggestions (firefighter instead of fireman). Yet browsers will find as well the stamp of acceptance on the dreadful herstory ("an alternative form to distinguish or emphasize the particular experience of women"); the execrable womyn ("alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequence m-e-n"); and the absurd wait-person (waiter or waitress) and waitron ("a person of either sex who waits on tables"). Future lexicons, perhaps, will give us waitoid (a person of indeterminate sex who waits on tables...