Word: uncommoner
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...great English eccentric. She was 6 ft. tall, with a haunted, Gothic face framed by wimples and toques; her long, narrow hands glimmered palely against brocade and velvet gowns. If at times she seemed to have created a lifelong pose for herself, it was a graceful pose of uncommon distinction. "I don't whine," she once said. "That's why everybody thinks I am enormously rich and have a heavenly time...
Time stands still. Hearing becomes in tensified; listening to music is a tremendous esthetic experience. Changes in taste and smell are relatively uncommon. But synesthesias-crossovers from one sense to another-are common, so that subjects "hear" colors or "smell" music. Ideas become visible. Thought and emotion are inseparable. Memory is oddly affected: the ability to repeat a set of numbers backward, or do simple tests, is grossly impaired, but long-ago events may be recalled accurately in minutest detail...
Johns chose subject matter that was purposely flat and familiar-U.S. flags, targets, maps, and the digits one to ten (see overleaf}. But to him, they are no more commonplace than the lemons of the still lifes of yesteryear. Transforming everyday objects into images of uncommon beauty is unquestionably the artist's task, and for Johns the act of metamorphosis is full of magic. He says: "I am concerned with a thing not being what it was, with its becoming something else, with any moment in which one identifies a thing precisely, and with the slipping away...
...these distractions, the family's control of the business has been remarkably enlightened. Even the critics of its nepotism concede that the family shunts its mediocre members into powerless "drag" jobs. The Du Ponts motivate their hired managers to fierce loyalty by giving them uncommon amounts of power and money. To achieve the outlook and flexibility of a small company, they have broken up their firm into a dozen operating departments that are only loosely supervised from above. A department general manager is like a captain on a ship, free to chart his own course so long...
Hugh M. Raup, director of the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., said yesterday that the trees along the Charles are "certainly not the typical American sycamore, which is found in the Midwestern United States but which is uncommon in the East." He said they were probably specimens of the "London plane tree, which has been widely planted in the East as a boulevard tree...