Word: tropisms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...