Word: tropism
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...great intensity, shaded by elements of emotional confusion, without a lot of actorish egocentricity. He's one of those people who seems to totally live his roles and we like Huck despite the fact that he's drop-dead handsome, full of suppressed anger, self-destructive impulses and a tropism to very bad karma...
...lurker in the shadows was not for him. A bourgeoise childhood (he was the bastard son of a merchant who achieved knighthood) in provincial Birmingham taught him his lifelong horror of grayness. His legendary Oxford career as controversialist, actor, debater, director, dandy and libertine imbued him with his tropism toward fame's warming light. Indeed, it might be argued that his life's central mistake was the innocent notion that he might dominate the great world as he once had the great university...
Never mind gin and tonic -well, perhaps a short one -and forget the return of baseball's prodigal sons. We are dealing here with primal matters, with a current in the national psyche far deeper and more powerful than our tropism toward corn on the cob and Japanese cars. Ice cream is our drug of choice, and butterfat-the word itself is dizzyingly lovely and globulous-is the occasion of our guiltiest and most delicious sin. Fourteen percent butterfat. Eighteen percent. Four hundred percent butterfat, some dreamer with glazed-over eyes says and actually seems to believe. The great...
...under the banner of New Politics will be disastrous. This would exclude the center, leaving Middle America and especially white union labor in the hands of the Republicans. The so-called "New Politics" of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy in 1968 was, on closer examination, the same old political tropism's directed at the center...
Loeb first attracted public attention by showing that tropisms govern some kinds of animal behavior as strictly as they had been shown to govern plant behavior by his teachers. (A tropism is an automatic, mechanical orientation of an organism in response to some controlling factor in its environment. A moth which can fly only toward a light and a plant which can grow only in the direction of light both show positive phototropisms...