Word: unlikelihood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...struggles to get to sleep weren't much assisted by his habit of wearing his crown in bed." He claims to have seen Joan of Arc disguised as a deer. He talks of a blustering poet, "all red and arrogant and full of spondees." He spins a long unlikelihood to illustrate a proverb made up on the spot: "The Devil is most likely to strike when you have your trousers down." Oops! Bad taste? Upon my soul...
Most undergraduates who said they plan to ask for the vaccine said they felt the risk involved was minimal and saw no reason to gamble on contracting swine flu. The skeptics pointed to the unlikelihood of an epidemic and the unknown risks of the vaccine...
From the outset, each sister was clearly unique. After Mary Lyon, "the founders of the Seven proceed in a descending spiral of unlikelihood," says Kendall. Sophia Smith, for example, inherited a fortune from a skinflint bachelor brother and intended to open a school for deaf-mutes until she was told that there were not enough of them to fill one. After rejecting a proposal that she make a bequest to Amherst-she believed that professors there were subversives bent on controlling central Massachusetts-Smith settled on starting the college, which opened in 1875. Matthew Vassar, a Poughkeepsie brewer, simply wanted...
LOCATION. Nuclear Physicist Ralph Lapp concedes the extreme unlikelihood of major accidents, but nonetheless advocates locating new nuclear plants far from population centers. In apparent agreement, the AEC recently forbade construction of a proposed plant eleven miles from Philadelphia. But, charges Ralph Nader, proposed AEC guidelines that aimed to force utilities to build plants in sparsely populated areas have been vetoed by utility executives because the industry fears that publishing the guidelines would imply that the safety of operating plants was in doubt. In fact, Nader says, eleven existing plants, including big ones near New York and Chicago, would...
Despite the unlikelihood that it will achieve its ultimate aims for some time to come-if ever-Scottish nationalism is being discussed, in this most empirical and skeptical of countries, as Scotland's first significant political movement of the past 50 years. At the very least, the movement has revitalized the Scots' sense of their own uniqueness. Poet MacDiarmid recalls a statement by Robert Louis Stevenson that "there are no adjacent peoples in the world so utterly and inalterably opposed to each other as the Scots and the English." To MacDiarmid the lesson to be drawn from Stevenson...