Word: ms
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...fibers, have long suspected that the answer might lie in a delayed reaction to a viral infection contracted years in the past. One suspect has been the measles virus, but 90% or more of all Americans in the prevaccination era got measles, while only a fraction of 1% developed MS. Now three New Jersey physicians have developed preliminary data suggesting that exposure to pet dogs may be related to MS...
...Stuart D. Cook and Peter C. Dowling of the neurology service at the Veterans Administration Hospital in East Orange knew that while MS is not a directly inherited disease, it often strikes two and sometimes more members of a single family. They sought out 29 such patients and examined their patterns of pet ownership and exposure. It turned out that the MS families differed from their MS-free neighbors in one relevant respect: a greater proportion of them had small dogs (defined as those weighing less than 25 lbs., or 11.4 kg.) that stayed indoors much of the time...
Common sense and reality have both been affronted regularly in the anti-discrimination war. The feminist movement's drive to desex nouns and pronouns was definitively dramatized by the 1976 case of Ms. Ellen Cooperman, who unsuccessfully sought to change her legal name to Coo-perperson. But God only knows-if, indeed, He or She does-how much needless fear of words has been generated by the campaign to cleanse public language of slander, denigration and defamation. It has obviously reduced the use of contemptuous epithets, but it has also unnecessarily inflamed some tender sensibilities. Take the heartfelt claim...
Still, there are ritual subtleties. Business relationships, for example, can be complicated. At first phone contact, a person may be "Mr." or "Mzzz"-slurred slightly so as not to be entirely the feminist "Ms." Then both names-"Hello, Paul Anderson?"-may be used for a couple of calls. Whereupon, first names seem permissible. Some companies take ostentatious care to have everyone use first names-though secretaries often remain "Ellen" while the boss is "Mr. Jackson." The jaunty practice of using initials is often helpful: everyone becomes E.C., J.B., T.L., and so on. Clare, a young woman who wants to make...
...serious problems, or, perhaps more accurately, some puzzling aspects for what is intended as summer-weight entertainment. The most curious of these is a certain unconscious-or is it semiconscious?-racism. The crowd pursuing the almost-heroin is composed entirely of black men, and their interest in sexually tormenting Ms. Bisset is at least as powerful as their greed for the drug. She is cast as a nice innocent kid trying to spend a quiet week in Bermuda with her boy friend. Out scuba-diving, they discover tantalizing clues to both treasures. Very soon she is being forced to strip...