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Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich 1929-, American poet, b. Baltimore, grad. Radcliffe, 1951. Since the 1970s her volumes of exquisitely wrought verse have increasingly reflected feminist and lesbian themes. Among her volumes of poetry are A Change of World (1951), Diving into the Wreck (1973), The Dream of a Comm...
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irony
irony figure of speech in which what is stated is not what is meant. The user of irony assumes that his reader or listener understands the concealed meaning of his statement. Perhaps the simplest form of irony is rhetorical irony, when, for effect, a speaker says the direct opposite of what she mea...
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Akashi
Akashi , city (1990 pop. 270,722), Hyogo prefecture, W Honshu, Japan, on the Harima Sea and the Akashi Channel. Overfishing and marine pollution have hurt what was formerly an important fishing port. Akashi now has a productive heavy steel industry, which dates back to the Korean War.
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San Salvador
San Salvador island of the Bahamas , West Indies. Many historians believe that it was the first land sighted by Columbus in the New World in 1492. The indigenous population called it Guanahani, and it has also been named Watling or Watlings Island. It was formerly confused with what is now known a...
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Boolean algebra
Boolean algebra , an abstract mathematical system primarily used in computer science and in expressing the relationships between sets (groups of objects or concepts). The notational system was developed by the English mathematician George Boole c.1850 to permit an algebraic manipulation of logic...
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influenza
influenza or flu, acute, highly contagious disease caused by a virus; formerly known as the grippe. There are three types of the virus, designated A, B, and C, but only types A and B cause more serious contagious infections. Influenza is difficult to diagnose in the absence of an epidemic , si...
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pronoun
pronoun in English, the part of speech used as a substitute for an antecedent noun that is clearly understood, and with which it agrees in person, number , and gender . In English the pronouns are classified as personal ( I, we, you, thou, he, she, it, they ), demonstrative ( this, these, that,...
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carpe diem
carpe diem , a descriptive term for literature that urges readers to live for the moment [from the Latin phrase "seize the day," used by Horace]. The theme, which was widely used in 16th- and 17th-century love poetry, is best exemplified by a familiar stanza from Robert Herrick's "To the Virgi...
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Potchefstroom
Potchefstroom , town (1991 pop. 185,552), North West prov. (in what was formerly a part of Transvaal ), NE South Africa. Located in a fertile farming region, Potchefstroom is the center of one of the world's richest gold-mining districts. Uranium is also mined. The town has malt factories and timbe...
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Kerouac, Jack 1922-1969
KEROUAC, JACK 1922-1969
BE at novelist
The Right Time
Jack Kerouac was a writer who earned his place in cultural history because of timing more than literary merit. In his books, most notably On the Road (1957), he expresses the spirit of the 1950s for an audience aimlessly seeking a suita...
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