The dirtiest 10 percent of 18,320 cars leaving Algonquin Road for southbound I-290 September 15-19, 1997, produced 61 percent of the carbon monoxide, 46 percent of the nitrogen oxides, and 44 percent of the hydrocarbons emitted by vehicles at that spot. That’s the news in a report from the University of Denver team that took the measurements (“On-Road Remote Sensing of Automobile Emissions in the Chicago Area: Year 1,” August 1998). At the other end of the spectrum, “the cleanest 40% of the vehicles, regardless of model year, make an essentially negligible contribution to the total emissions.”
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Stop the dictionary, I want to get off! Oxford University Press is gathering more than 18,000 new English words or meanings per month to put into its “Oxford Database of World English,” according to a recent press release. Among its 1998 finds are exformation (“explicitly discarded information, i.e. knowledge that is essential to understanding a communication, but is already shared by communicating parties, and is therefore not referred to”) and meatspace (“the physical world, as opposed to the virtual world of on-line interaction”).
“Pro-life women from various classes were unified in their rejection of materialist values,” according to a blurb in the University of Chicago Press’s spring catalog on the book Speaking of Abortion, to be published in March. “This group strongly believed that a reduced family income was worth the sacrifice in order to stay home with the children….Pro-choice women’s beliefs, however, were divided along class lines. Working-class women defended choice because they viewed themselves as a group whose interests are continually threatened by legal authorities. In contrast, middle-class women argued for individual rights and thought abortion necessary for those who aren’t financially ready.”
