Word: wood
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...predict than the course of human affairs. The first rule of forecasting should be that the unforeseen keeps making the future unforeseeable. In the 1890s it was widely predicted that the U.S. would be bare of trees by the 1920s -- they would all have been chopped down to provide wood for heating and cooking. Along came oil burners and the gas stove, saving the trees to be menaced instead by acid rain...
...measured in light-years and Mach speed, and sheathed in silicon and alloy. In the world of 999, on the eve of the first millennium, time moved at the speed of an oxcart or, more often, of a sturdy pair of legs, and the West was built largely on wood. Europe was a collection of untamed forests, countless mile upon mile of trees and brush and brier, dark and inhospitable. Medieval chroniclers used the word desert to describe their arboreal world, a place on the cusp of civilization where werewolves and bogeymen still lunged out of the shadows and bandits...
...forests, deep and dangerous as they were, also defined existence. Wood kindled forges and kept alive the hearths of the mud-and-thatch huts of the serfs. Peasants fattened their hogs on forest acorns (pork was crucial to basic subsistence in the cold of winter), and wild berries helped supplement the meager diet. In a world without sugar, honey from forest swarms provided the only sweetness for food or drink. The pleasures of the serfs were few and simple: earthy lovemaking and occasional dances and fests...
...prompted him to experiment with ethnic accents, first as an assistant chef for nouvelle California guru Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley and later in the same city at his own Fourth Street Grill, where he was one of the first chefs in the country to use mesquite wood for grilling...
Four year after the Boston clubs began to admit women, few women have joined. Was the victory useless--or just incomplete? The latter, say some women; the place is still "too male," all that wood and leather, and cigars, and...well...