Word: twig
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Some of these circuits are long and slow, so that consequences may take years or generations to manifest themselves. That helps sustain the cowboy myth that nature is a neutral, unchanging backdrop. Moreover, evolution seems to have wired our brains to respond to rapid changes, the snap of a twig or a movement in the alley, and to ignore slow ones. When these consequences do start to show up, we don't notice them. Anyone who has ever been amazed by an old photograph of himself or herself can attest to the merciful ignorance of slow change, that is, aging...
...first glance, Moscow this summer looks much as it has for decades: office workers queuing up at street-side ice cream stands, red-kerchiefed flocks of Young Pioneers fidgeting in the mile-long line outside Lenin's Tomb, old women sweeping courtyards with twig-bundle brooms, faded red signs proclaiming VICTORY TO COMMUNISM. But beneath the capital's seedy, socialist exterior there is an unaccustomed hum of excitement. Passersby pore over posted copies of Moscow News, marveling at articles on (gasp!) official corruption and incompetence. Once banned abstract paintings hang at an outdoor Sunday art fair. In public parks...
Mark Twain for the prosecution: "Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig . . . the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series." D.H. Lawrence for the defense: "Fenimore Cooper has probably done more than any writer to present the Red Man to the white man." For the reader: the Library of America, offering The Leatherstocking Tales in all their flawed glory...
...oddities (the Midwestern pioneers who used large, hollow sycamores as barns or even dwellings), homely anecdotes (the willow posts in a neighbor's fence that took root and grew into a row of trees), and vivid turns of phrase (the black spruce needles that grow all around the twig "like the hair on the tail of an angry cat"). Borland's concern for conservation is all the more effective for its understatement, as when he quietly notes that the scientist who measured the age of a California bristlecone pine at approximately 5,000 years cut it down...
...that I think of history as an art, not a science). In writing I am seduced by the sound of words and by the interaction of their sound and sense. Recently at the start of a paragraph I wrote, "Then occurred the intervention which irretrievably bent the twig of events." It was intended as a kind of signal to the reader. (Every now and then in a historical narrative, after one has been explaining a rather complicated background, one feels the need of waving a small red flag that says, "Wake up, Reader; something is going to happen.") Unhappily, after...