Word: downwards
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...Starlings also have a nondescript call of their own. "The greater part of it," says Ornithologist Aretas A. Saunders, "is sibilant, fricative [sounds of zh, sh, th], or harsh and rattling, but here and there the bird intersperses loud, clear, slurred whistles, most of them slurred downward. . . . The young, when gathering in their first flocks in June and committing depredations in cherry trees, make a loud grating or hissing noise...
When the British wanted to honor the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, famed Victorian philanthropist, they did it with a pun. His memorial fountain in London's bustling Piccadilly Circus is topped by an aluminum winged archer shooting an arrow downward ("burying a shaft"). Popularly, the statue is known as the god of love, Eros. Tradition has it that, while Eros stands in Piccadilly, no Londoner can be arrested for kissing a girl. Last week, if any Londoner felt like kissing in public, he had to watch his step; for Eros was removed-for the duration of World...
...down. Another element, sort of added attraction, is some thought-content,--not much, it's true, but some. The characters of Madison Breed and B. J. Wickfield are drawn on a slightly higher level than the broad, low, and beautiful plain of sex, even though they make frequent excursions downward. The girl-lead, Cindy Lou, while undergoing ordeal by hell-fire and brimstone in the process, eventually lands on the top of the heap in the final scene, showing that Miss Booth may have some surreptitious respect for her and the things she stands...
...embrace of the Transcendentalists, the fashionable gentilities of the Lowells and Longfellows, the transient Utopianisms of the Alcotts, the dated rhetoric of his contemporaries. What moderns can see, what his contemporaries missed, is that Thoreau meant what he said. He was, he declared, a "Realometer," working his feet "downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance ... to a hard bottom...
Sept. 6: "It seems as though the sun could hardly shine upon a world where one man is able to speed civilization downward...