Word: precursor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Still agile later that same day, Truman kidnaped two historical figures to add to the 13 Democratic Presidents whose pictures he hung at a new party clubroom: John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), over the protest of Adams' great-great-grandson that his forebear was a Republican precursor, and Andrew Johnson (1808-75), who was a War Democrat when he became Abraham Lincoln's Vice President. Discoursing further on his reading of history, Harry scaled down every U.S. schoolboy's image of the man who said, "Give me liberty or give me death!": "There...
...that a day would come when handsome, dark-eyed Mayor Pietro Nucera might forget himself and take them by violence. In the harsh code of justice on the slopes of Aspromonte, the Harsh Mountains in the toe of Italy's boot, the act of rape is often the precursor of enforced marriage, and the young mayor with his flashing eye and dark, curly hair had all the earmarks of a guappo-a dashing and romantic figure...
...necessary precursor to space travel, this satellite is due to be launched next fall, and a large part of the project's success depends on the preliminary work being done at the two observatories...
...within three minutes of lighting a cigarette. Still more provocative was the case of a man whose pulse went from 68 to 104 after he merely held a cold, empty pipe in his mouth for two minutes. Proponents of idioblapsis believe that it may be the direct precursor of heart attacks or even cancer. Happy with what they called a "revolutionary, all-important theory," allergists scattered from Florence to their home cities, vowing to seek proof of it in their patients' pulses...
...literary precursor of the novel was the tale, originally an oral narrative. In the hands of such latter-day practitioners as Oscar Wilde and Max Beerbohm, the tale became a highly sophisticated means of telling a story that would not be believable if told in any other tone of voice. In The Seven Islands, Novelist Jon (The House by the Sea) Godden makes the unbelievable believable by spinning with quiet skill a stately little tale about India and hanging from its frail threads the weight of an ancient way of life...