Word: yardstick
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...Jefferson is a good man of the Enlightenment," says Ronda. "Knowledge is valued to the extent that it is useful. The yardstick here is always utility. He'll measure a river by its navigability. He measures land by its fertility...
Jefferson had given Lewis an unambiguous mission: to find "the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent." Judged by that yardstick, the captains had utterly failed. What Jefferson hoped would be a "practicable" water route had turned out to be a brutal portage across parts of Montana and Idaho that included some of the most rugged wilderness in North America. If nothing else, later traders and settlers, appalled by the expedition's experience, learned where not to go and found a friendlier route along the Platte River across Nebraska and over South Pass in Wyoming...
Collaborators hope the package, the first report of its kind, will become an annual report which can be used as a yardstick for University progress on diversity...
...wine-making country inevitably measures itself against its elders. "We can't and don't want to emulate Australian Shiraz," says Trinity Hill's Skinner. "We don't have the climate for it. We're focused more on a Rh?ne and a French Syrah." French wines may be the yardstick, but there's none of the secrecy or insiders-only air. Trinity prefers an educated customer and dedicates $18,000 worth of wine a year to tastings and educational sessions in their glass-and-concrete visitors hall, where discussions range from harvest dates, crushing methods, blending, filtering, fermenting to even...
...Times to learn about ourselves. Perhaps sarcasm is strictly the province of novelists and playwrights. But might we include columnists under the sarcasm umbrella? My own published sarcasm gives me the chance to learn about my readers, to learn about myself and to learn about myself more if the Yardstick column gets renewed for another semester. Just kidding. Sort...