Word: thumbing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Birders have a rough rule of thumb for distinguishing between normal and obsessed watchers: the obsessives dream of going to Attu, a bleak Aleutian island 100 miles from Soviet waters and about 1,500 miles from Anchorage. Attu vaguely resembles a penal colony, but it is paradise to birders pining for a flyby of the Siberian rubythroat or other Asian rarities. "We have people who go without any hope of seeing new birds," says Larry Balch, the ABA's president and head of Attour, a service that brings about 65 birders to the island each spring for three weeks. "There...
Gary Hart belongs in that somewhat mysterious recent tradition. He has often, consciously or unconsciously, tried to imitate John Kennedy. He has brushed back his hair with the same gesture that Kennedy used, walked with the same gait, held his hand in his jacket pocket with the thumb sticking out, just as J.F.K. did. He has a penchant for some of the high destinarian rhetoric that Kennedy used, the appeal to a visionary new generation. Hart kept using the first person plural in his press releases. His campaign sounded a note of the bogusly grand. Hart is Kennedy typed...
...ironically, as Man learns more and more he seems to be able to fit his knowledge into less and less space. Current computers that contain the sum total of human knowledge are no bigger than a man's thumb, and are shrinking every day. Soon the devices for storing knowledge will be far too small to read from, and the great advances of civilization will be lost...
...questions of the moment: Where are we right now, and how far do we have to go to the next stop? The answer is that we are on page 3 of the itinerary, and today we will be traveling about this far (here the bus driver spreads his thumb and forefinger...
...categories, even when there is no evidence of past discrimination. Decisions should not be made exclusively on the basis of race or sex, explains Assistant Professor Kathleen Sullivan of the Harvard Law School. However, these factors can now be legally weighed in the balance, says Sullivan, "with a thumb on the scale...