Word: trait
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Using the humble pea, an obscure Austrian monk named Gregor Johann Mendel proved that living things pass their characteristics to later generations with mathematical regularity-almost as if the formula for each trait were conveyed in a separate little package. Last week, more than a century later, a team of young Harvard researchers reported that they had finally zeroed in on that Mendelian package. For the first time, science had isolated a single gene...
...with his will, energy and versatility. Yet out of the 10 million words that Besterman estimates he wrote, how many are read-how many are readable-today? Certainly not his dated verse tragedies about Frenchified classical heroes. Nor his special-pleading history. Nor his philosophical tracts like Traité de Métaphysique which placed him, in Besterman's phrase, only "the tiniest possible step away from atheism...
...live elsewhere. The difference does not even have to be in their favor. The native Parisian, for instance, is born with an ineradicable hauteur that others define as rudeness, and the native New Yorker knows the meaning of avarice before he can spell the word. So strong is the trait that a century ago, Anthony Trollope waspishly noted that every New Yorker "worships the dollar and is down before his shrine from morning to night." To preserve the spirit of the place, he suggested, every man walking down Fifth Avenue should have affixed to his forehead a label declaring...
...followed Serra to California were lusty freebooters (Puritans, for some reason, had little zest for ?l Dorado). The trait they shared was an ability to build what Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr. approvingly called "a special brand of democracy, one based on the notion that the best good of all was served by everyone looking out for himself...
...battle of Lützen, he was a growing threat to France. The passionate Gustavus, as O'Connell observes, was unable to tell the difference between religion and politics; and the cerebral Richelieu, who was accustomed to making the distinction, failed to understand that trait in Gustavus...