Word: thoughtfulness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...repetition of his earlier psychic detonations. When they promised not to call as witnesses the girls named in his diaries, Sirhan became glib and almost ingratiating when he spoke of the man he had killed. When he first glimpsed his victim two days before the assassination, Sirhan had thought of Kennedy as looking "like a saint." Yet three weeks earlier, his admiration for the Senator had turned to vitriolic hate. "If he were in front of me," Sirhan declared last week, relating the incident to the jury, "so help me God, he would have died right then and there...
Shortly before the six-day Arab-Israeli war in 1967, a well-meaning Christian friend asked Jewish Scholar Abraham J. Heschel why he was "so dreadfully upset." Heschel thought for a moment. Then he replied gently: "Imagine that in the entire world there remains one copy of the Bible, and suddenly I see a brutal hand seize this copy, the only one in the world, and prepare to cast it into the flames...
...many cooks spoil the broth"-so goes a proverb that is as familiar to most Americans as its meaning. The Iranians expressed the same thought with different words: "Two midwives will deliver a baby with a crooked head." So do the Italians: "With so many roosters crowing, the sun never comes up." The Russians: "With seven nurses, the child goes blind." And the Japanese: "Too many boatmen run the boat up to the top of the mountain...
Hidden Code. Can it be that the proverb-literally, "before the word"-provides a clue to the common denominator of all human thought? This possibility has been raised by George B. Milner, 50, a linguist at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Many anthropologists and linguists have long suspected that the human mind obeys a hidden code-just as the computer follows instructions programmed into it before it begins to "think." In an article for Britain's New Society magazine, Milner contends that the proverb may stand breathtakingly near to the source...
...England, Milner compared his Samoan stock with the proverbs current in Europe, and was struck by the many similarities in structure, rhythm and content. It was almost as if the proverb shared a common source. Since this was culturally impossible, Milner considered another potential origin: the universality of human thought...