When at last he reached home, eleven and a half years after setting off, and having achieved nothing, he discovered that his relatives had had him declared dead in his absence and had enthusiastically...
When they aren’t being incompetent, city officials like to relax with a little corruption.
Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.
Why is it, I wondered, that old people are always so self-centered and excitable? But I just smiled benignly and stood back, comforted by the thought that soon they would be dead. I
With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them
The Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don’t ask me why).
Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don't think a clean pillow-case will make a difference... Indeed, if your pillow is six y...
A Croatian seismologist named Andrija Mohorovičić was studying graphs from an earthquake in Zagreb when he noticed a similar odd deflection, but at a shallower level. He had discovered the boundary be...
Among them Pleistocene (most recent), Pliocene (more recent), Miocene (moderately recent) and the rather endearingly vague Oligocene (but a little recent).
Ancient light in
Aposiopesis.
Coloured temperature image of the first photons ever created, representing the most ancient light in the universe, which are detectable on Earth as a faint, steady background noise or—more familiarly...
Different. Often used unnecessarily. ‘He plays milkmaid to more than 50 different species of poisonous snake’ (Observer); ‘The phenomenally successful Rubik Cube, which has 43,252,002,274,489,856,000...
Properispomenon.
Mass and energy have an equivalence. They are two forms of the same thing: energy is liberated matter; matter is energy waiting to happen. Since c2 (the speed of light times itself) is a truly enormou...
Nostalgia such as can be known only by those who remember the days of hot metal typesetting and noisy composing rooms
Period of time. A curiously irresistible expression for many writers, as here: ‘Marcos claimed that the seizures could be expected to continue for a considerable period of time’ (Sunday Times). Make i...
Polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word.
Since for forty years every study of lead’s effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives. In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology17...
Slubberdegullion,
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