Word: stirring
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Soon, inspired reconstructions of the Cambrian bestiary began to create a stir at paleontological gatherings. Startled laughter greeted the unveiling of oddball Opabinia, with its five eyes and fire-hose-like proboscis. Credibility was strained by Hallucigenia, when Conway Morris depicted it as dancing along on needle-sharp legs, and also by Wiwaxia, a whimsical armored slug with two rows of upright scales. And then there was Anomalocaris, a fearsome predator that caught its victims with spiny appendages and crushed them between jaws that closed like the shutter of a camera. "Weird wonders," Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould called...
Race baiting is the deliberate effort to stir racial animosity among different racial groups. In the past, this was often done by claiming that some black person, usually a black male, was guilty of some crime, usually against a white woman. Contemporarily, this is often done by calling attention to the special privileges blacks purportedly enjoy, always at the expense of whites, most often at the exclusive expense of white males. Always, race baiting is disingenuous; it is based on partial, misapplied, misinterpreted or simply false information. Because it is deliberate and disingenuous, race baiting is never justified nor justifiable...
...momentous sights revealed by the Hubble can stir anybody's imagination. These are rare glimpses of the outer boundaries of physical reality, and of the fiery cataclysms in which nature perpetually regenerates itself. Even astronomers have trouble keeping their professional cool when pictures like the new one--showing a section of the Eagle Nebula, a knot of interstellar gas and dust in the constellation Serpens--come beaming in from space. "When I saw it, I was just blown away," says NASA's Ed Weiler, the Hubble's chief scientist. The image has such visual impact, in fact, that some researchers...
...revival could be in the making. The very hardships and perceived injustices of the American workplace have begun to stir a new militancy among workers. And that has helped produce signs of a comeback. "In 2 1/2 years I haven't seen as much raw anger as I see in the workplace today," U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich told a Time conference on the economy two weeks ago. "One thing I've heard repeatedly around the country from unorganized workers is the following: 'I never thought about joining a union, but for the first time I'm now thinking...
...exposure? Area radio stations such as WCRB have begun to cater to the pop classical market, even experimenting with playing only movements of pieces rather than complete versions one almost never hears a contemporary work, perhaps because of an unfounded assumption that new works can't possibly stir up the same pleasures as old ones...