Word: ur
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Avant-garde writer and culture impresario Gertrude Stein was a stolid, heavy presence, monolithic, unladylike. She liked to gossip and had a great laugh. She boxed with welterweights for exercise. Art expert Bernard Berenson described her as looking "like a statue from Ur of the Chaldees." Alice B. Toklas was a chain smoker with a slight mustache, given to exotic dress, Gypsy earrings and manicured nails. They met in Paris in 1907. Alice, 29, found Gertrude, 33, "a golden brown presence." Gertrude insisted that Alice had heard bells heralding Stein's "greatness." Alice said Gertrude was simply struck by love...
...prime example being Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica) in which theorems, following strict rules of inference, sprout from axioms like limbs from a tree. This process of theorem sprouting had to start somewhere, and that is where the axioms came in: they were the primordial seeds, the Ur-theorems from which all others sprang...
...successful will he be? A look at the ur-Hollywood pic, Cecil B. DeMille's "Ten Commandments", is straight from the Democrats' playbook. A young, strong, and less-nutty Chuck Heston leads his people from the cruel bondage of the Pharaoh Ramses (Yul Brynner). Of course there's the must-see Red Sea parting, and for fantasy time, plagues of frogs, boils and locusts that the Big Creep might enjoy visiting on the special prosecutor...
...urge to find a nice, affordable house, something outside of town but not too far. In Crabgrass Frontier, the essential history of suburbanization, Kenneth T. Jackson quotes a letter to the King of Persia, inscribed on a clay tablet and dated 539 B.C., that describes the pleasures of the Ur-suburb. (Literally. It was in Ur.) "Our property...is so close to Babylon that we enjoy all the advantages of the city, and yet when we come home we are away from all the noise and dust...
...Ur shriveled. But the inclination to get out of town survived. Ancient Rome had its surrounding settlements. Chaucer mentions the 'burbs in The Canterbury Tales. All the same, it wasn't until the later 20th century that suburbia was imagined as the ideal human habitation, an arrangement of houses and lives so fundamental, it was taken for granted that the Flintstones lived there...