Word: americanus
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...other delicacy from the sea seems to excite American palates as much as Homarus americanus, more familiarly known as the lobster. Americans consumed some 50 million lbs. last year, and recent OPEC-style price increases in the retail cost of lobsters (up 145% per Ib. since 1969) have not curbed the U.S. appetite for the clawed crustaceans. By 1985 the National Marine Fisheries Service projects nearly a doubling of demand, to about 90 million lbs. But where will these lobsters come from...
...afraid of the big bad monkfish? Certainly not Julia Child, that indefatigable doyenne of the television kitchen, even though the monkfish, or Lophius americanus, is such an ugly American that fish stores ordinarily chop off its fanged foot-wide head before they display the fish in order not to frighten customers. Taping a cooking session for the new season, Child hauled the fish up by its tail, showed the camera its "skin that moves around" and praised its "marvelous teeth-top, bottom and middle." "It is firm, lean and gelatinous," she insisted, "and very good in bouillabaisse." When...
...nation itself. Our more perfect union was forged at a convention (Philadelphia, 1787), divided against itself at another (Montgomery, Ala., 1861), reunited at a rather intimate one (Appomattox Courthouse, 1865) and renewed quadriennially. Long before Sinclair Lewis chronicled the fictional convention high jinks of George F. Babbitt, boobus Americanus and prototypical conventioneer, other observers dis covered our penchant for gatherings. "As soon as several Americans have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce before the world, they seek each other out, and when found, they unite," observed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. Editorialized the Nation...
...LITERARY KEY to late Puritan ideology, Bercovitch chooses not the jeremiads but Cotton Mather's epic work, the Magnalia Christi Americana--particularly his "Life of John Winthrop." In his "Life," Mather portrays Winthrop as a "Nehemius Americanus," a peculiarly American saviour whose life foreshadows the Second Coming. Mather's ambition, according to Bercovitch, is to be the Winthrop of his generation; writing during the decline of theocracy, Mather, he says, offered himself--in his capacity as a representative American type--as a link between the triumphal era of Winthrop and the millenial future, thus initiating a special mode of defining...
...Homo Americanus. To call Sheed antichurch, anti-labor or even anti-Mafia is to underestimate how anti-everything else he may be. If he does not really like these subcultures, he suspects they are better than U.S. culture as a whole. What he complains about in America's tribes-within-the-tribe is not that they are too idiosyncratic but that they are not idiosyncratic enough. "Mobsters and bishops" share the same "heavy disingenuousness." Labor threatens to form an "Establishment troika with business and government." Fiery young Mafiosi will be left to "man the switchboard and analyze the computer...